In late 2008, Gartner published a research paper entitled Key Issues for Business Intelligence and Performance Management Initiatives, which discusses barriers to the development of this technology, including establishing a BI strategy and architecture, and integration. The firm’s analysts also made five predictions for the Business Intelligence market in the next three years, reported at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit which took place last week in The Hague (Netherlands).

BI had previously been included in Gartner’s list of 10 key technologies for 2009, along with virtualization, cloud computing, green IT, and social networking. Gartner stressed that “BI is particularly strategic due to its relation towards business managers and knowledge workers - the main organizational thinkers and decision-makers. Providing them with appropriate BI tools will only make their jobs so much easier and more effective.”

In its introduction at the BI Summit, Gartner said that BI is a top 3 priority for CIOs and Senior Executives, even though only 20% of business users actually use BI proactively. It then presented five predictions about the future of BI tools.

First, Gartner predicts that by 2012, more than 35% of the 5,000 largest global corporations will find it difficult to make appropriate decisions about their business and markets. In times of economic downturn, this is a major obstacle. Gartner advises quickly creating a unit dedicated to business intelligence to overcome this to fill in the gaps in capacity and analytic functionality.

The second trend is that business units are taking over from IT and by 2012 will control at least 40% of the total BI budget. The problem seems to be that although business users acknowledge the fundamental role that IT plays in the process, they no longer trust them to deliver the information they need to make decisions.

Gartner warns, however, that there is a risk of creating silos of information within the company which would be counterproductive. There is certainly no question of not including the IT in these projects.

The third trend is toward SaaS and software-on-demand. Gartner predicts that 20% of companies will use SaaS style, industry-specific analytic applications. The firm recommends creating a centralized data warehouse to store date from these applications and share them with other parts of the company.

The fourth trend is that BI opens to social networks. Gartner expects that this year, BI tools will meld social software into the large BI platform capabilities in response to increasing interest in informal collaboration.

And finally, Gartner predicts that by 2012, more than 30% of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered via coarse-grained mashups. This will provide operational and analytical information without the need to implement a comprehensive BI platform.

One thing is missing there - the impact that open source is having on BI. I won’t start a new discussion here on the relevance of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants - you can refer to my earlier post here, and to Andy Bitterer’s Setting the Record Straight reaction. I was, however, amused by the way Gartner danced around the whole issue in their recently-released Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms: “This year Gartner gave serious consideration to including open-source BI suppliers in the Magic Quadrant, and even altered the inclusion criteria to allow for this eventuality. As yet, though, no open-source BI platform supplier generates enough revenue to be included in the Magic Quadrant. However, while they don’t meet the revenue requirement, Jaspersoft and Pentaho have emerged as viable players in the BI platform market and as such we invited these firms to take part in the Magic Quadrant user survey.”  So, they tried hard this time, but failed. Too bad.

Of all these predictions, I especially concur with the first three. It is clear that while the BI market has continued to grow over the past decade, companies are struggling to really launch into the adventure, as explained in the first paper cited in this blog. BI projects are scary because they foment large integration projects. Yet to me, this fear seems less justified today, thanks to advances in technology and input from innovative companies - such as Talend - that continually listen to their customers.

The salvation, therefore, will be business users who strongly encourage their management and IT departments to make the move. Today with hosted SaaS, deployment issues evaporate because BI functions are provided as on-demand services, accessible via a browser. On the other hand, even traditional solutions are becoming more friendly and accessible to non-technical personnel.

In any case, Talend’s investors seem to have no qualms about the development of these technologies and have confirmed their belief in Talend. As posted by TechCrunch, this constitutes “another validation for open source software.”

Will the Year of the Ox, which is about to start in China, coincide with the advent of BI in the business world? I’m not an expert here, but some say that “This Ox year will bring stability and growth where patience and diligence pay off.” Exactly what a BI project needs to succeed.

Yves

After a very successful first quarter of existence, during which over 500 people were trained at no cost in continental Europe, we are exporting the Talend Discovery Roadshow to the US and the UK.

So what is this Roadshow?  We believe that the best way to demonstrate to our potential users the value that Talend’s technology can bring to them is to have them try it themselves.  So we are getting on the road and organizing a series of free technical workshops in a number of cities.  During 3 hours the participants to the workshops will receive complimentary training on Talend Open Studio - and at the end of the workshop they will leave with a USB key containing the data integration jobs they have developed.

We have already planned 7 stops in the US: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and New York.  Sign up now, or suggest other cities as the next stops!

In the UK and Ireland, we are polling our users to help us choose the first locations.  So it you are based in the UK or Ireland, now is the time to weigh in!  Let us know where you’d like to attend a free Discovery Workshop.

Continental Europe isn’t left behind: dates are already planned for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and will soon be added for France, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium… Sign up here.

Hoping to welcome you soon at one of our workshops!

Yves