This month Dashboard Insight has devoted their month to new dashboard and BI solutions and technology for 2010. In general, many people start off the year by looking ahead, or even back, and trying to surmise what will be.  Here is some interesting content that has already been developed that is related to upcoming trends and what the market has in store for companies this year:

• How BI’s Past Will Reflect Product Offerings In The Future (my most recently published article)
• What is Hot in Business Intelligence for 2010 and Beyond (by William Laurent, published on Dashboard Insight)
• Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence and Analytics (by Suresh Katta from Saama Technologies, Inc., published on BeyeNetwork)
• A Tale of Two People (by Bill Inmon, published on BeyeNetwork)

At the end of every year, predictions are made and trends are identified setting the tone for the upcoming year.  Within business intelligence applications there are always changes because of the advancements in technology – i.e. mobile, social media, processing speed, storage, etc. All of these items will continue to affect BI moving forward.  Aside from the increase in performance, because of the increasing ease of development, price points will also become more diversified as vendors with offerings with lower price points continue to make inroads into the market and expand their offerings. For the mid-market this will be very beneficial…

Moving forward, WiseAnalytics will continue to cover the mid-market – looking at what companies are doing, what solutions are available, and particularly the value associated with BI for mid-market organizations. In addition, a continued emphasis will be placed on dashboards and data visualization in terms of how they are being used and vertical applications and data visualization design.

Overall, next year promises to be very interesting for those looking at the dashboard market or who are focused on BI for small and mid-sized businesses.

One of the fastest growing types of BI adoption is through Software as a Service solutions.  Organizations are looking at SaaS and comparing potential solutions to other in-house options. This means that more competition exists for solution providers as in the past companies looked at one type of solution over the other.  Now, the market place is saturated with many types of solutions and business applications without the clarity of which products are directly in competition or complementary to one another.  In addition to companies being confused over the types of solutions best suited to meet their business needs, solution providers are looking at SaaS providers and the use of on demand solutions in general as a new competitive factor within the overall BI market landscape.

Approaches to identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS include online surveys posted by vendors not within the SaaS space, such as the Klipfolio SaaS survey aimed at identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS.  It will be interesting to see in the next year or so whether SaaS adoption and services offered will increase within the BI space.

Sorry for the delay in posting the link to the BeyeNetwork/Actuate Webinar:

BIRT: Transforming Business Intelligence to Rich Information Applications

On Thursday November 19th at 11am PT/2pm ET I will be participating in a Webinar with Actuate. The presentation will discuss the importance of this new way of applying BI through:

• an overview of traditional BI and the drivers that are shifting the way BI is applied within organizations
• trends in the industry that support these changes
• how this affects end users
• how newer applications are being used within the organization (i.e. RIA, expansion of open source, diversity in deployment and interaction)
• what this means in terms of scalability and overall end user experience
• how organizations are applying these changing technologies

Here is the link to register:

BIRT: Transforming Business Intelligence to Rich Information Applications

Here is a link to the recording of yesterday’s beyeconnect chat that took place to discuss the costs associated with free BI:

• Recorded presentation and chat

Luckily organizations can take advantage of free software offerings and get their feet wet and explore different business intelligence solutions.  However, when looking at free solutions it becomes important to remember that depending on the type of solution,  internal infrastructure and development are required to get the system up and running.  For the purpose of the presentation, I used five examples of solutions that are offering different types of free BI offerings (in alphabetical order!):

• InetSoft
• Jaspersoft
• Microstrategy
• Pentaho
• QlikView

Each offers something different and depending on what the business goals of the organization, it might make sense to try a free solution, or compare them, to help identify what works for the company.

On Monday November 9th at 12pm ET, there will be a chat hosted by BeyeConnect regarding the real cost of free BI. I will be conducting a brief presentation based on the fact that:

After the general presentation, we will have a discussion and interactive chat – I hope to see you there.

The topic of TCO is always one that generates a lot of discussion within companies.  When dealing with mid-market companies specifically, it can be even harder to evaluate overall TCO for BI.  Aside from fixed expenses such as software costs, maintenance, support, licensing, and potential hardware requirements, organizations also face a lot of unknowns. What will the real value of the solution be in terms of saving costs, people hour reduction, and overall gains to the organization? How can decision makers identify potential drawbacks based on type of solution choice?  The list of possible questions are endless, but the places to go for answers aren’t always available for smaller organizations looking at BI for the first time.

There are many mid-market companies that have taken the plunge and that have fairly mature business intelligence environments.  However, other organizations are confused in terms of where to begin.  Hopefully over the next several months, we will start to uncover how small and mid-sized companies can get the most out of BI and analytics.  Whether this means looking at initial costs or expenses overtime, or looking at actual business benefits and how to sell those benefits to colleagues within the organization.

Earlier this week, Endeca (a search provider) made two announcements relevant to BI:

1. A partnership with Informatica that lets Endeca customers access and use standardized data integration functionality, and
2. the integration of Xcelsius dashboards and SAP BusinessObjects intelligence search within Endeca’s current platform.

The traditional way of looking at BI and search involves the use of search within BI applications.  This may include the ability to search text strings or for reports that have been created but that might not be easily accessed.  By turning the tables and embedding BI and data integration within an overall search platform, the ability to gain value out of information expands exponentially.  Instead of being limited to BI related content, search solutions can give organizations access to internal, external, structured and unstructured data sets.  This creates more of a unified approach to data visibility and gaining overall insights into business. As BI continues to mature, its use will become more complimentary to operational and other analytical applications creating a more holistic approach to how data management and visualization tools are applied within organizations.

After a couple of weeks on the road, I just arrived back from Teradata Partners last night.  My overall impressions were very positive about the event and about some of the initiatives that we’ll see from them in the coming months.

However, while being away I wasn’t properly able to advocate for the family pet…and he obviously needed me to save him from this:

So aside from heavy workloads, a lot of research related to how mid-market companies can best measure TCO, and planning the 2010 research agenda, pet advocacy will be in my job description for the next couple of weeks – at least until Halloween!