7

Seven Trends That Will Change

Business Intelligence As We Know It

Contents
Introduction

Trend #1: Self Service BI

Trend #2: BI Goes Mobile

Trend #3: Collaborative and Social Features

Trend #4: Business Intelligence in the Cloud

Trend #5: Open Source Takes Over

Trend #6: Big Data

Trend #7: Real-time Insight

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Conclusion

11

Learn More

11

Introduction
After years of relative stability, the
world of business intelligence is now
experiencing a sea change.
The old rules of thumb no longer apply, and companies
cannot assume that yesterdays BI strategies continue to be
viable. Consider these fundamental shifts:
We manage differently. Instead of relying on
instinct, todays businesses place more stock
in number-crunching and objectively measuring performance.
Users experience data differently. Most
people have used web-based applications to
manage and interact with their personal data
for years. These consumer grade applications
rely on an intuitive and highly interactive
experience with near-instantaneous response.
Great expectations. From MapQuest, Gmail
and Facebook to more specialized solutions
including those for blog traffic analysis and
portfolio management, these tools have
raised expectations for end users. If we want
users to be engaged, our BI apps had better
do the same.
Information management technology is
leaping ahead. Now its possible to derive
genuine business insight from large quantities
of data more quickly, for dramatically less cost
and effort than ever before.

The rules have changed.

Collectively, these changes mean that many of the
old BI technologies, architectures, and approaches no
longer apply.
Now, businesses want to make fact-based decisions,
based on the analysis of data from a variety of data
sources, in ways never before possible. Users want a
compelling, effective experience. And the technologies
to support both of these are quickly coming online.
The old rules.
Youve heard themyou may even have repeated
them aloud:
The average end-user isnt sophisticated
enough to do their own analysis.
Many important analysis approaches are
simply not technically feasible.
Real-time reporting and analysis arent
feasible: they require exorbitant budgets
and performance-killing access to transaction systems.
Comprehensive BI is an expensive game,
requiring pricey software and hardware.
The new rules ... are being written now. The changes
are significant. So lets take a look at seven trends that
will force us all to re-thinkand re-tool.

Trend 1
Self-Service BI
Reporting and analytics user expectations
have changed, More and more end users
create and modify their own output and
Dashboards and mashboards abound
In the past decade, most of us have become true information
consumersat least in our personal lives. We use data such
as historical prices, ratings and scores to decide which movie
to see, which schools to attend, to how much to pay for a
home. Were able to access and analyze this data because
our favorite Internet applications have evolved familiar, easyto-use, and intuitive interfaces for data exploration.
This mentalityand the expectations it fostershave
spilled over into our business lives. Users have become more
sophisticatedand more analytical. And managersat all
levelswant to make quick, accurate business decisions
based on hard data rather than intuition.
Not long ago, managers were accustomed toand believed
inprinted reports. When deeper understanding was
required, they relied on business analysts: power-users who
wrote SQL code, defined and revised reports, and (occasionally) employed complex tools to explore the data.
But that was then. This is now.
Today, business users (including managers) expect to do
more themselves, depending less on business analysts
who have, in turn, become more specialized, focusing on
proactively identifying trends and opportunities instead of
building reports on demand.

The reports have also changed. No longer static, theyre

highly interactive, allowing individual users to access them
via the web, drilling, filtering and modifying them as needed.
Analysis has changed, too. Now, sophisticated data visualization toolscommonly imbedded with an application or
based in-memory to enable setup easedeliver at-a-glance
insight.
The rise of dashboards and mashboards.
With the consumerization of information access and interactivity, there have evolved better methods for users to combine, share and interact with data. Users can now personalize
their dashboards to meet their needs, including combining
external data with internal corporate data. They can also
interact with a wide range of powerful visualizations:
Gauges and meters deliver at-a-glance info.
Conditional formatting highlights exception
conditions and simplifies visual navigation,
helping users pinpoint specific items of interest.
Sparkline charts help users quickly pinpoint
departures from trends.
Today, dashboards are real-time, making them useful for
displaying operational data. And users can interact with
them without any need to involve busy IT resources.
In Web 2.0-speak, these are called Mashup applications. No
longer does a one-size-fits-all conglomeration of a few important (though frequently disjointed) reportlets, designed
by a single person in IT, make sense. Todays dashboards
deliver important new capabilities that are personalized,
interactive, and immediate.

Doing more with less.

Self-service reporting may be the most effective means at
ITs disposal for improving its own BI productivity. In a recent
TDWI survey, 66% of IT professionals said implementing
self-service BI was high or very
high in a list of potential costsaving measures. Why? Users
get reports more to their liking,
more quicklywhile IT frees
up resources to work on more
strategic initiatives.
A Self-service BI checklist. As organizations examine BI solutions that can support self-service business intelligence, they
should look for:
Interactive Dashboards with drill-down and
drill-through capabilities.
Dashboard frameworks that let individual users choose dashboard layout and content.
Flexible dashboard designers that can easily
combine relational, non-relational and public
addressable information.
Parameter-driven and column-based filtering
tools that let users focus on specific data.
Granular data security with column and row
suppression capabilities.
Advanced visualization and easy-to-use charting.
Conditional formatting.

Trend 2
BI Goes Mobile
Until recently, few businesses could
deploy mobile BI. In a mid-2008
Aberdeen Group survey, only 17% 1
of companies were delivering BI data to
mobile phonesthough fully 78% were
interested in eventually doing so 2.

The proliferation of iPad and iPhone apps

has spurred demand for anywhere- anytime
information access.

Heres why:

Touch-screens have improved the user experience.

The standard approach to mobile BI required

display of reports via web browserbut devices rendered HTML inconsistently, and often
quite poorly.
The displays on mobile devices were too small
to allow practical report viewing.

Web pages can be displayed as designed,

without the re-rendering required by lesscapable mobile phones.
3G and 4G networks now offer significantly
improved download speeds.

Aberdeens 2010 study reveals starkly different attitudes

from two years previous, with 23% of 146 companies having
deployed, at this point, a mobile BI application or dashboardand an additional 31% planning to do so within the
next year.3 By mid-2011, over 50% of companies will likely be
using some form of mobile BI.

In short, the Mobile BI5 era has arrived. It is quickly becoming

a must-have for many business intelligence initiatives, especially where theres a need to disseminate critical, real-time
business information to large numbers of people.
In the 2010 Aberdeen Group survey, nearly a third of respondents intended to augment (or abandon) current BI vendors
in support of Mobile BI because their current platforms were
inadequate.
Organizations searching for a BI solution with strong support
for Mobile BI should focus on tools that:
Render reports within a web-browser, using
HTML formatting thats visually strong, both
on computer monitors and on a wide variety
of mobile devices.

Network speeds were too slow (until the wide

spread adoption of 3G).

Facilitate the creation of custom BI apps aimed

at specific devices.

Most mobile devices allowed limited interactivity, preventing users from filtering,
re-sorting, drilling down or performing other
important actions.

Support some level of report and analysis

interactivityespecially sorting, filtering and
hyperlinkingon mobile devices.

Although users were interested, they werent

yet feverishly demanding mobile BI.

Offer strong support for business rule-driven

alerts and notifications.

Rapid evolution of mobile devices and platforms added complexity.

Feature well-designed security infrastructures

that protect and withhold sensitive data from
unauthorized mobile users.

Nearly all of these obstacles have been overcome in the

last two yearsin part due to the introduction of advanced
mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android) and low cost, higher
bandwidth wireless networks.

Most of these deployments will allow users to view reports

and perform lightweight analyses via small, portable dashboards4 but will not support creating reports or heavydata exploration. Many will use alerting or notifications, to
let the on-the-go user immediately know when data begins
to stray significantly from the norm.

Computerworld, Business intelligence goes mobile, July 14, 2010.

The Aberdeen Group: 11/30/2010 Mobile Business Intelligence: A Path to Pervasive BI
ComputerWorld August 9, 2010. Business intelligence apps go mobile, by Michael Fitzgerald.
4
Monash, Curt: DBMS2.com, What matters in mobile business intelligence 7/15/2010.
5
Dresner Advisory Services, LLC. DAS Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study. 2010.
1
2
3

Trend 3
Collaborative and Social Features
Many BI users have been taking advantage of social networking venues like
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for
years, and have come to expect social
functionality in all applicationsand for
good reason.
Over the last few years, social networking has in fact explodedand not just among young people (Twitter is seeing its
highest growth rates among users aged 39 to 51).
Users expect appsBI includedthat help them more
effectively collaborate with others, rapidly improve the
understanding of content and make better-informed decisions. Employees and customers, who use the same social
networking features they enjoy outside of work, are able to
reach new levels of creativity.

Here are some examples of collaborative and social features

as theyre already being applied to business intelligence:
Report tagging lets individuals help others to
more quickly and easily find the reports they
need.
Comment and discussion threads let users ask
questions of report authors, share views on
report value, offer instructions for use, suggest
improvements and more.
Annotation features enable users to make
reports more meaningful by setting context
and providing background information; think
of a store manager linking a given products
low sales to supply problems.
Up- and down voting enables users to more
rapidly locate useful content by exposing a
communitys assessment of a data point and/
or report value.
User-provided ratings on report designs, dashboards, etc., give feedback to creators and
help guide future output for consumers.
Privacy settings enable users to selectively
share their reporting, analysis and dashboarding designs and output with the right
audience.
Workflow features enable rules-based business intelligence collaborative processes
including review and feedback, approval routing, decision tracking and more.

Trend 4
Business Intelligence in the Cloud
Why is the cloud topic one? Because it
provides unprecedented flexibility in deploying applications, and because it has a
huge potential for reducing costs.
With cloud technology, companies generally pay only for
the hardware, software, bandwidth and other resources they
useand not until they actually use it. Adjusting capacity is
easy, and adjustments are immediately reflected in costs.
The cloud is an umbrella term for three different ways to
deploy software:
1. Software as a Service (SaaS). Here, the focus is on application software. Customers pay a periodic (usually monthly)
subscription fee to access application software hosted
by a solution provider; access is through a web-browser.
Subscribers and end users avoid the issues of hardware
setup, software installation, configuration or upgrades.
Salesforce.com is an example of a SaaS product.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS). With PaaS, subscribers pay
for everything they need to build, maintain and run their
own applications; everything is hosted by the provider,
and accessed via web browsers.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS lets organizations
rent access to hardware, deploying the applications
they build or buy to these off-site servers. The subscriber
performs some limited aspects of server management.
Amazon Web Services provides a form of IaaS: access to
fractional servers on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The first two approachesSaaS and PaaS are most relevant to Business Intelligence. In the SaaS model, for example,
organizations could subscribe to a specific analytic application, with all user access via browsers. The same hardware
infrastructure and underlying software platform are used
by all subscribers, all end users. Subscribers have nothing to
install, configure or maintain beyond the devices on which
their browsers run.
In the PaaS model, the subscriber develops, implements and
operates any specific applications, using the hosted development and runtime resources; access to those applications
is via web browsers. BI architectures that are standardsbasedand easy to integrate via web serviceswill be best
suited for the PaaS model.
The role of the Cloud.
In a recent TDWI survey, 31% of survey respondents saw
cloud deployments as a major way to work with 2010s relatively small IT budgets.6

Responsiveness to occasional or periodic

heavy computational workloads such as
quarter-end or year-end analyses
Fast and cost-effective means of executing
software trials or proofs of concept, and of
deploying short-term sandboxes for one-off
analytic needs
Organizations searching for cloud-based BI should look for:
1. Web-based user interfaces and access methods.
2. A broadly available environment, addressed from a variety
of global locations and through and a wide range of
services, preferably using web-based APIs.
3. Pay-as-you go pricing (the best way to gain the full economic benefit of cloud computing).
4. A secure environmentat network, identity management
and authentication layers.

Companies are learning to use cloud-based BI creatively to

meet business goals and lower costs. Here are some of the
reasons:

5. Elasticity: the ease of adjusting hardware capacity to meet

changing needs.

Rapid, hands-on evaluation of business intelligence solutions.

7. SaaS solution providersor those who may go that route

in the foreseeable futureshould seek multi-tenancy
features.

Reduced costs during the development cycle,

thanks to the ability to pay for fractional
shares of dedicated servers.
Elimination of capacity planningand the
shortages or overspending that accompany it.
Organizations can simply pay for the computing capacity their application uses, as its used.

6. Full support for APIs consistent with open web standards.

TDWI Best Practices Report: BI on a Limited Budget: Strategies

for Doing More With Less, By Wayne W. Eckerson, July 2010
6

Trend 5
Open Source Takes Over
Open source is now becoming mainstream in business intelligence. The tools
are mature, proven, and making deep
inroads in companies large and small.
In a TDWI Technology Survey in May, 2009, more than onethird of organizations reported using open source software
in business intelligence, data integration or data warehousing applications.

Why has open source BI become so popular?

1. Low cost. 87% of recent Gartner survey respondents
expected considerable TCO (total cost of ownership)
savings from using open source. With pressure to make
every dollar count in a tough economy, open source is
an obvious strategy.
2. Modern, lightweight, standards-based technology
means developers can more readily and easily integrate
BI with in-house technologies.
3. Mature solutions. At this point, a wide range of open
source solutions has been proven suitable for production
by many customers. Jaspersoft Reporting, for example
commercially deployed hundreds of timeshas now
been in use for more than 10 years.

Just as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache web server, MySQL

database, and PHP/Perl/Python scripting) technology stack
has come to dominate the development and deployment
of web-based applications and websites, the BI sector is developing de facto open source software stacks as well. These
typically include open source database, data integration and
business intelligence tools.

4. Minimal risk. The open source model means organizations can try before they buy. BI projects, particularly
those involving data warehouses, have traditionally
faced substantial risks associated with uncertain (but
costly) technology choices, some of which can amount
to several hundred thousand dollars. Open source lets BI
projects rapidly prototypeand even stress-test solutions with high volumes and user count simulation
with minimal risk.

5. Strong user communities. Open source communities

such as JasperForge greatly improve the stability and usability of open source software, by offering deep insight
into user needs and providing low-cost, highly valuable
pre-release feedback.
6. Flexibility. Open source technologies are typically newer,
with open, forward-looking architectures, and are more
flexible in terms of data source support and integration of
new capabilities.

Trend 6
Big Data
According to a Gartner study, the volume of data generated in 2009 alone was
greater than in the preceding 5000 years
combined. Enterprise data in the next five
years will grow an additional 650%.
An umbrella term coined in 2008, Big Data refers to technologies that allow organizations to quickly analyze and
derive insight from massive data sets, the scale of which was
unimaginable just a few years ago. Less expensive commodity hardware is also an enabler of these solutions, which can
analyze and aggregate petabytes of data at once (1 petabyte
= 1000 terabytes).
How big is Big?

Mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes)

of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200
exabytes.
The Economist , 2/27/2010

While most companies have nowhere near a petabyte of

data today, any organization storing more than a few terabytes can benefit from Big Data technologies. With traditional database, data warehousing, and business intelligence
technologieseven when applying current best practices
exceeding 10TB is difficult. 7 The predicted data growth
rates mean organizations with only two or three TB of data
will soon exceed the limits of traditional technologies.

Big Data technologies can also help any organization

seeking to dramatically reduce query times, or to complete
complex analysis tasks within smaller time windows.
Big Data Innovations
New technologies to store and speed the processing of massive amounts of data fall into three categories (some vendors
offer hybrid solutions incorporating two or more of these
approaches):
1. Hardware acceleration. These database appliances use
DRAM or Flash memory instead of hard disks, improving
physical read/write performance, and may also modify
database code to take better advantage of multi-core
processing and other advances.
2. Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Databases. These
SQL-compliant databases are designed to spread the processing of data over many machinestypically so-called
commodity servers. Some MPP databases also employ
shared nothing architectures, which spread data storage
over several machines as well, eliminating potential scalability bottlenecks.
3. Map-Reduce, Hadoop, and other NoSQL approaches.
These approaches, collectively called NoSQL, or Not Only
SQL, enable data access via programming languages
without the use of SQL-based interfaces, and can spread
data across many separate machines. Data structures are
typically flat-file or other non-relational formats.

NoSQL approaches are especially important for analysis

tasks that cannot be efficiently coded in SQL. These include
analyses that involve several passes over the data such as
Monte Carlo simulationsand cases where the data is un- or
semi-structured, such as text analysis.
Map-Reduce and Hadoop are the most widely known NoSQL
approaches. Map-Reduce is an algorithm that spreads data
analysis tasks over several nodes, and then reduces all of
the nodes results into a single result set. Hadoop is an open
source implementation of Map Reduce, plus additional
functionality, available from Apache.
With these Big Data technology innovations, businesses
can now perform analyses formerly considered infeasible,
whether because there was too much data, the analyses
took too long, or because the processing required was
poorly suited to SQL.
Preparing for Big Data BI.
Regardless of which Big Data technologies are employed
for an analytic task, business users still need to view and
understand results. Given the potentially huge output sets,
business users need ad-hoc reporting and analysis tools
designed to find needles in haystacksincluding powerful
data visualizations, summary-to-fine-grain drill-down, and
dynamic filtering and sorting.
These reporting, analysis and user interface capabilities must
also be data format-agnostic, working seamlessly traditional
RDBMSs, MPP databases, or files spread across the network.
7

TDWI Next Generation Data Warehouse Platforms by Philip Russo, 2009. Page 11.

Trend 7
Real-Time Insight
One challenge to the BI industry is a
longstanding one: the need to reduce
the time required to perform and complete query and analysis tasks. But the
explosion of data and compression of
business cycles has made this requirement more universal.

BI technologies have responded, incorporating man of the

advances discussed here, with impressive results. Examples
of analysis tasks shrinking in duration from days to minutesand hours to secondsare becoming more and more
common.
The business impact is significantand will become
more so as these capabilities proliferate. Organizations are
demandingand will realizethe ability to drive decisionmaking based on up-to-the-minute, fully-analyzed data.
Consider the impact on marketing organizations, which
spend millions on campaigns to generate interest and
demand. Where it might have taken weeks or months to
optimize these campaignswhile marketers awaited data
collection and analysistheyre approaching the ability to
evaluate, adjust and optimize these campaigns in a matter
of hours. Advances like these are crucial in the age of search
marketing campaigns that must evolve in real timeovernight just isnt fast enough.
Similarly, operational decisions across the enterprise are
becoming more urgent, further underscoring the need for
real-time analytics. Its no longer enough to understand
what happenedand whylast month, or even last week.
Real-time insight can still be challenging in some situations,
but the requirements will likely persist. BI solutions with
forward-looking architectures are more likely to give enterprises the ability to meet these needs.

Conclusion

Learn More

The business intelligence sector has undergone major

changes, impacting enterprise appetites for operational data
and strategic insight, while enhancing the technology available to deliver these insights.

The Economist, 2/27/2010.

Special Edition on Data, Data, Everywhere.

Not every IT and software development organization can act

on all of these trends. However, as BI strategies evolve and
BI project decisions are made, understanding these trends
can help enterprises reap maximum benefit from their BI
investments.

Using Collaboration to Extend the Reach of BI,

by Colin White, BI Research. At International Summit on Data
Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Rome, June 2010.
TDWI Technology Survey of May 2009
Gartner: Open Source in Information Management: State of
Play. By Donald Feinberg, Business Intelligence Summit, April
12-14, 2010, Las Vegas.