What Is Happening In Business Intelligence Today?

Below is the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Business Intelligence Trends and InetSoft Innovations. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): Business intelligence is a really hot market. I have been watching this market for close to fifteen years, and I don’t think I have ever seen as much interest, as much curiosity, and as much realization that this is no longer a luxury, that business intelligence is no longer a nice-to-have environment and a set of applications, but it's a must. It’s a key for survival.

And here are the reasons for it. Among other reasons, we obviously look at ever increasing data volumes that are coming from both inside the enterprises and outside of the enterprises, including the new huge data volumes of social data that just keeps growing by leaps and bounds, and whereas a few years ago, you could analyze your departmental and even some corporate data, especially in smaller enterprises, just by using spreadsheets or desktop-based applications today.

Now, when we are talking about hundreds of terabytes and many organizations are looking at several petabytes or thousands of terabytes of data, obviously you need large industrial scale robust business intelligence solutions to manipulate that data.

Number two, complex regulatory reporting requirements aren’t getting any simpler. Obviously, we are seeing the increase in complexity in that segment, especially in certain industries such as financial services, especially given all of the crises in the global economic markets, and health care obviously keeps getting more and more regulated. Even oil-and-gas industry, as manifested by the recent BP disaster, obviously isn't going to I think get a break from complex and ongoing regulatory reporting.

And then, there is also a question of increasing complexity in corporate operations. Whereas, years ago, we had enterprises that used to produce one type of a product or provide one type of service, today they have expanded and today they are mostly multi-product, multi-business line enterprises. And yesterday, these enterprises used to operate in a single geography. Today, they are global.

So all of a sudden, there is this increased need to keep a bird’s eye view of your increasingly complex operations. But all of these challenges have been around for a few years and what has really emerged and what’s really different that started happening over the last few years is that slowly but surely business intelligence has spread from the back offices and middle offices, such as finance and HR and operations, into the front office of enterprises where chief marketing officers and heads of sales and then CEOs.

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