In 2011, Saugatuck completed a survey of 200 enterprise IT users and
business leaders and roughly 30 vendors that found cloud-based business
intelligence and analytics would be among the fast growing of the cloud-based
business management solutions in the market over the next two years. This
growth represents an 84 percent compounded annual rate, but did the prediction ring true?
Among companies that are currently using business intelligence tools and have
been since 2007, the adoption of business intelligence has remained flat. The 2012 Successful BI Survey shows that
approximately 25 percent of the employee base relies on business intelligence
tools, a figure that has not changed in the last five years. Given the adoption
of new technologies and integration into mobile capabilities, this result may
come as a surprise to most.
For others, however, the result of this survey simply demonstrates that the
wrong element is being measured to truly understand what is happening in
business intelligence in 2013. The tools for gathering the data don’t matter
nearly as much as what platform companies are using to access the data and what
they are doing with it once it’s in the data center. It is the challenge of
enterprise in this next generation, and one that is easily overcome with data
analytics and the strategic use of the cloud.
The stagnant adoption of business intelligence tools in the enterprise and the
small business is not due to a lack of understanding of the value it presents,
but instead the result of significant investments in legacy systems that
demanded a focused approach to every network and data center deployment and
integration. The process was often cumbersome and expensive, which limited
access for a number of potential users. Now, as more companies are embracing
the cloud, the playing field is about to change.
The cloud is expanding business intelligence and analytics to include multiple
users throughout the organization, simplifying access and making business
intelligence and the use of analytics more ubiquitous. The cloud provides one
level for managing the complexities of business intelligence, including the
gathering of analytics components, networking and storage. As big data
continues to play a dominate role in a company’s ability to effectively
compete, it’s no longer enough to simply manage information.
All companies are examining the best way to manage the exponential growth in
unstructured data, forcing key decision-makers to determine the best way to
analyze this data in real-time to support the effective use of this
information. While Gartner is predicting the growth of the business
intelligence market to hit 9.7 percent this year, business analytics in the
cloud is expected to grow three times faster.
Businesses of all sizes are flocking to the cloud for business intelligence and
analytics as it provides vast computing and storage resources without
significant investment. Plus, the ability to gather and act on granular
information is a key competitive advantage and one that is difficult and costly
to achieve without business intelligence analytics in the cloud. As the data
bubble continues to expand, those able to embrace the cloud will enjoy greater
capacity and capability when turning that data into actionable intelligence.