Business Intelligence: Businesses Use Visualization and Drill-Downs to Discover Data Insights

Gartner’s recent research (download the report complementary from Microstrategy or from Tableau) on the Business Intelligence (BI) market shows that both Business Intelligence and the complementary technology Big Data markets grew significantly in 2012.  The BI market is on track to grow from $57 billion in 2010 to more than $81 billion in 2014.  The latest report from Gartner evaluates BI product offerings from major vendors and includes their positioning on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI.

Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of BI vendor Birst, commented that “The demand for BI is indeed growing, and the inclusion of Cloud BI vendors in this year’s Magic Quadrant demonstrates that Cloud is increasingly in demand and going mainstream as well.”

The Gartner report notes that a major characteristic of the growth in the BI market during 2012 was in the area of ‘data discovery’.  Businesses are using analytic tools to better visualize and drill down into their data sets, allowing them to derive new and better insights.  The Gartner report characterizes this trend by saying that “this emphasis on data discovery from most of the leaders in the market — which are now promoting tools with business-user-friendly data integration, coupled with embedded storage and computing layers (typically in-memory/columnar) and unfettered drilling — accelerates the trend toward decentralization and user empowerment of BI and analytics, and greatly enables organizations’ ability to perform diagnostic analytics.”

John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, analytics, SAP, said that “Business intelligence and analytics are creating competitive advantage for companies that can take advantage of new information streams and provide real-time data to all employees.”

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner, has said for some time that “information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”  Picking up on that theme, Rita Salam, a BI analyst at Gartner and BI Magic Quadrant report author, said that “analytics is the combustion engine of business, and it will be necessary for organizations that want to grow, innovate and optimize efficiency.  Given its far-reaching impact, it is one of the few software markets that thrive even in adversity.”

Salam said that “A large enterprise makes millions of decisions every day.  The challenge is that companies have far more data than people have time, and the amount of data that is generated every minute keeps increasing.  In the face of accelerating business processes and a myriad of distractions, real-time operational intelligence systems are moving from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have for survival’.  The more pervasively analytics can be deployed to business users, customers and consumers, the greater the impact will be in real time on business activities, competitiveness, innovation and productivity.”