Wayne Eckerson and Cindi Howson - Business Intelligence Market Trends 2008

Wayne Eckerson and Cindi Howson

Director of research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), and founder of BIScorecard.com, respectively. The following is excerpted with permission from their recent coauthored report on business intelligence for TDWI.

• As BI becomes more pervasive and is deployed on an inter-enterprise basis, vendors who currently offer only per-user pricing will also offer per-server pricing. Many BI vendors have begun to shift their pricing, but start-ups are using simplified, all-you-can-use pricing as a competitive differentiator.
• Near-real-time dashboards will be in demand. Users want fresher data faster to gain insight into core operations and business processes and make faster, better decisions. This movement toward operational BI puts a premium on BI and data warehouse tools that capture and deliver data in near-real time. This opens up a whole new range of applications to BI and gives further momentum to dashboards as a primary vehicle for delivering information to an undertapped segment of users.
• Event-driven analytic platforms come of age, as there are many analytic applications that require real-time monitoring and process execution. To date, organizations have custom-built these applications, but there is an emerging class of tools, event-driven analytic platforms, that capture business events in real time off messaging backbones, filter, calculate, and aggregate events, apply rules, and trigger alerts, queries, updates, or other actions when predefined thresholds have been exceeded.
• System and usage monitoring will take precedence. Monitoring capabilities, currently lacking in most BI platforms, will reach show-stopper status as the number of BI users in any given deployment escalates, and as BI becomes mission critical. IT will rely on niche vendors (such as Teleran and Appfluent) that currently provide better monitoring capabili¬ties than many BI vendors.
• Mission-critical infrastructures supporting BI solutions will become much more industrial strength in the next 12 months. A majority of enterprise BI customers will deploy BI solutions on clustered servers with failover and disaster recovery host sites. Many will also parallelize their ETL processes and load data warehouses in near-real time using "micro batches" or event-driven messaging feeds to overcome the limitations of shrinking batch windows, expanding data volumes, and 24x7 user access.

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