Future for Business Intelligence

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Developments in Business Intelligence Software. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Looking to the future, enterprises will continue to expect their data to increase, and technology will continue to evolve as well. So what do you see for the future for business intelligence, where is the market headed?

Mark Flaherty (MF): The simple answer to that is that the future is here today. As I said before, the data volumes these days are in petabytes, or thousands of terabytes. Requirements change way too fast. The world moves at lightening speed. So I think the two key areas that we discussed and addressed throughout this discussion and presentation, agility and self service for business users are going to remain key trends for the foreseeable future. Luckily, we do have some next generation technologies to address them and our advice to all of the enterprises that are faced with these challenges is not to fight them.

Sure, there are definitely some concerns on part of IT traditionalists. They are concerned about relinquishing control into the hands of end users. They are concerned about the single version of the truth. But guess what? The genie of end users trying self-service for their BI needs is out of the bottle, so everybody needs to address it. They need to embrace it, and they need to take a very hard look at today’s fast moving environments and see how this next generation BI technology can address them.

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Next think about two big influences going on right now. First of all, we have speed, faster time to decision; the other one is volume, not only volume of data, which I think is the most obvious point, but also volume of users, more people using BI and analytics. These influences combined with a more business value driven use of analytics against current data, not just historical data, is a big-big shift.

The next thing that will influence business intelligence is the use of unstructured information. People are going to want to include that in their BI systems. How to implement that one with semantics is a challenge. Another area of future development is automated embedded intelligent solutions which will bring us the right analytics at the right moment of time.

The explosive data volumes and the challenges that companies face in trying to manage and make sense of all that data are not insignificant. A lot of our technology development going forward is going into our high performance data access engine, which we will be able to help companies manage those large volumes of data, but more importantly to drive better and faster insight into that data which is currently a challenge today.

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