Firstly a big thank you to Scott Humphrey for his organisation of this annual one off event which was by far the best ‘Summit’ that I have attended. The ability to be able to talk to extremely knowledgeable and sharp analysts along with my fellow vendor participants and the members of the press in such a relaxed atmosphere where conversations last 30 minutes or more instead of the grabbed two to three at the normal event has being invaluable to me personally.
The sessions during the weekend were presented exceptionally well by all those taking part and I gained knowledge and understanding whilst also being able to discuss what if scenarios with my peers.
My takeaways from the summit include:
- The future of BI could be more about the application and less about the platform.
- Analytics will continue to expand and become more mainstream – vendors will need to provide easier access to complex analytical suites. This will lead to people who do not see themselves as analysts becoming involved in this type of work
- There will be a lot of disruption around new technology fitting in alongside legacy systems.
- They way forward for NoSQL/Big Data seems to be finding a way to be part of a hybrid ecosystem within the enterprise – but only if we can find a way to provide both BI and analytic platforms that server off this new architecture.
- Social Data and Machine data will go beyond the hype and provide insights and benefit to organisations in the near future.
- The Big Data management layer is ready to be expanded into the enterprise but needs support from applications.
It was obvious from the many discussions that all present believe that the landscape within organisations is changing very rapidly and that in the future the progression to a hybrid ecosystem within companies will lead to the requirements for more flexible and user friendly BI systems. The inclusion of Social Media in to many analytical applications is a sign that the trend of “Big Data” is very much alive and driving a lot of this change within companies.
The ability of BI Vendors to be able to provide a data catalogue when connecting to various data sources which allows the business user to complete their own data integration by interpreting the data sets being provided to them is key to the ability of these self service BI to support fully an agile and mobile BI infrastructure. Mobility of BI will need to become platform agnostic if it is to succeed in delivering on the promise of fully interactive and self service BI to those who require it on the move – the way forward may lie in development of HTML 5 applications which will work on any platform.
It was also interesting to note that recent studies have shown that many users of BI tools prefer and trust more in those applications which provide a full touch interface – especially at the information consumer level – who like the ability with modern devices of being able to investigate and collaborate on the data in their hands by gestures instead of mouse clicks. With Gen Y becoming more and more prevalent not only in the work place but as consumers of information we should expect to see and be able to react to this change of interface requirement’s from a static display of information on a dashboard to the user wanting to investigate the information presented to them by simple gestures. Allowing the consumers of the information to ask the ‘What If’ questions which drive the requirements of analytics will lead to these systems being improved and simplified for general use.