by Dante Arias Torres
The concept of Business Intelligence (BI for its acronym in English, business intelligence) was initially proposed by Howard Dressner, an analyst of the company consulting firm Gartner, being used to designate any decision-making support system. Let's look right at Gartner and specialized consultancy Redwood Capital, companies optimistic about the future development of business intelligence.
Redwood Capital projects steady growth of BI in the coming years until 2018, with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 8.2%. Similarly, Gartner believes that Business Intelligence systems have been consolidated and today must be able to provide interactive facilities of analysis of data, which are easy to use without requiring a specialized support.
According to Gartner, the BI industry is demanding access, at all times, the key information for decision making; However, you should balance this requirement without sacrificing the Government's data. There is an increasingly clear trend that business intelligence systems to run on mobile devices and in the cloud, i.e. the BI is more current than ever, with a new focus for providers: ensure that these systems meet the demand for skills increasingly more advanced data analysis.
In the market there is a need to combine new technologies emerging as the Big Data and analytics. In this way, new technological developments aimed at the analysis and processing of data strengthen BI systems and not to replace them.
The future of Business Intelligence
It makes sense outlining what will be the development of business intelligence in the coming years, so that the public can better target their decisions.
The analysis of the literature were detected six trends in business intelligence systems:
- Support for data parallel processing
Gradually increase the need for BI systems have data bases and storage technology with support for parallel processing, in order to expedite the processing of millions of data. Examples of providers that already include processing in parallel in their solutions are Microsoft, Oracle, and Teradata.
- Support Big Data
We will see business intelligence systems with this support through technologies such as Hive, HBase, Mahout, Sqoop, Zookeeper, Teradata, Hadoop and MapReduce. Expected that this trend will consolidate soon.
- Processing in memory
In recent years, has emerged a new approach to processing of data known as processing in memory, in which most of the relevant information is stored during processing in the main memory of the system (RAM memory) and not on your hard disk. This will speed data access times and decrease processing times. It is expected that this approach be used more frequently in the implementation of business intelligence systems. For now, few vendors implement this feature in their solutions, for example, Oracle.
- In the cloud
The operation of large and medium-sized enterprises business intelligence systems is not economic, especially by the costs associated with the maintenance of data warehouses. Therefore, it has begun to analyze the feasibility of migrating systems to the cloud computing. Some BI vendors that already provide services in the cloud are Oracle, Tableau, Birst.
- On mobile devices
It has opened the possibility of using so-called smart phones and tablets to obtain business information almost instantaneously. This scheme has begun to collect strength, clearly marking a trend of development of business intelligence systems with support for mobile devices. Some BI vendors with this type of development are Sisense, Microsoft and Oracle.
- Connected to the Internet of things
The success of a BI system depends largely on the quality and quantity of data that has. A new source of data for companies will be the so-called Internet of things (IoT or Internet of All Things). Hence, it is expected that future BI systems consider transparent to the IoT incorporation to increase information processing, which will improve responses to user queries. Few efforts have been made to create systems of BI that connect to the IoT, but his appearance is likely at any time.
An encouraging panorama
BI systems continue to have much relevance because the new technological developments as the Big Data, cloud computing and computational Analytics will not affect the growth of the business intelligence, they will drive it, because BI systems will benefit from a greater number of available data to improve the final results that are provided to customers. As the technological information advance, BI solutions become increasingly complex.
We can foresee that in the near future, Business Intelligence systems will have support for the computation in parallel, the Internet of things, the computation in the cloud and mobile devices. It is also common to include techniques of Big Data and the processing of data in memory for its analysis of information, this to the expected growth in the volume of data of the companies, which is product of the emergence of diverse data sources such as social networks.
Sources
- Dome (2015). From Big Data to better decisions: The ultimate guide to Business Intelligence today. Dome
- Redwood-Capital (2014). Business Intelligence: Sector Report
- They sallan, r. L. et to the. (2015). Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. Gartner
- Watson, H. J. and B. H Wixon (2007). The Current State of Business Intelligence. In Computer 40.9, pp. 96-99
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