11.25.07
Convergence, Interoperability, and Pervasiveness
Clients of ours want to know what we see in the market place and how the recent spate of business intelligence company sales will affect them. We see two main results of the acquisitions: convergence and interoperability. Our clients want to protect their technology product investments and not start from scratch. So vendors are coming up with tools and applications to help them do that. For example, in Oracle’s case, there’s a big push towards service oriented architecture (SOA). Just ping the data source to get the relevant information that you want.
The consolidation in the BI space will force all of the big players into building a big, shared common BI platform. This captures whatever you need for analysis. You can then access that information from multiple sources. Which leads to the third thing, which is BI is becoming pervasive. With BI tools, you are making decisions based on information used to make previous decisions, so low level decision making can become fairly obvious and perhaps automated which allows you to use the BI tools to make higher level decisions. Analysts are no longer bogged down by doing clerk-level tasks and can actually focus on doing analysis.
And for example, instead of looking in the past to determine your top ten customers, you can use BI to predict who the top ten customers will be in the future. When you’re doing predictive analysis, you’re moving to more sophisticated data mining, and you can now get some actionable analytics.