According to Gartner Inc., business intelligence and analytics will play an increasingly important role in reinventing business models. Up until now, analytics has largely centred on IT projects. However, as digital technologies become priority for chief information officers, the influence of analytics is set increase significantly.
Further, the research firm expects 50 per cent of potential customers to deploy analytics by 2014. By 2020, this would increase to 75 per cent. Thereafter, analytics is expected to reach 100 per cent of potential users and foray into the realms of the ?Internet of Everything? concept.
However, several issues and challenges facing the sustained adoption of BI and analytics remain. These include: ease of use, performance and relevance. Many disruptive technologies ? Facebook and web browsers being just two examples – have displayed significant improvements in those factors. Now, there is a vast array of new technologies addressing ease of use, performance and relevance that unlocks new opportunities for business users
According to the research firm, the area of interactive visualisation or data discovery is one such technology. This segment grows three times faster than traditional business intelligence front-ends, and is expected to reach $1 billion in value by the end of next year. The vendors that dominate this segment are newer vendors, such as QlikTech, Spotfire and Tableau. However, MicroStrategy, IBM, Microsoft and SAS have all launched rivaling products in the past year, propelling that entire segment into a newer, much more competitive phase. This implies that data discovery has emerged as a mainstream architecture.
The area of relevance, or context, which is the shift from build, to buy is equally important. There are now many more tools to address the specific needs of businesses, such as workforce analytics for the human resource manager, or fraud analytics for the risk manager, or churn, for the telecommunications company. This is increasing adoption to a new set of users, previously not accustomed to business intelligence.
As a result, the competitive landscape is opening up to include a wider range of vendors from the large software vendors, such as SAS, Oracle and FICO to service providers including IBM, Accenture and Deloitte who aim to use packaged analytics to sell solutions. At the opposite end, there are the SaaS and data-as-a-service providers, selling data, and the small independents specialising in one vertical, or one horizontal context. This is also opening new pricing models, not just license/maintenance, but also subscription and sometimes value-based pricing.
Gartner predicts that despite ongoing consolidation and acquisitions by the larger vendors, new categories of analytic applications will continue to emerge. This will be on account of the smaller vendors continuously innovating, thereby resulting in more market fragmentation. Existing categories of analytic applications are certainly consolidating and changes are occurring within each category, as vendors are acquired or merge, and certain categories are disappearing as they are superseded or integrated into other categories. However, the variety of data, channels and business issues that are open to analysis is also continuing to grow, resulting in continual fragmentation of the market.
These trends will be accentuated further beyond 2014, with cloud, social, mobile and information/big data as new channels for bringing analytics to new audiences.
