Companies are upgrading to business-led Business Intelligence

Interpreting information to make better-informed decisions is an age-old business concept. However, the data sets that businesses have collected are so large and complex that they have started pursuing big-data, advanced-analytics management and implementation of Business Intelligence (BI) systems in significantly increasing numbers.

Enterprises are getting smarter in their decisions by establishing advanced analytics capabilities and BI solutions as a fundamental part of their efforts to gather better insights that can help increase revenues.

More importantly, with the boom of modern BI in recent years, interest in using it to help slice and visualize the vast volume of data flowing around companies is now turning towards more sophisticated self-service solutions that are business-oriented and create additional value.

Important tipping point in the enterprise analytics industry

According to the Gartner report ‘Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms’ (early 2016), the business analytics industry has changed considerably over the past year, turning from a reporting-based market to a business-centric and user-friendly category. Leading BI providers have shifted the focus to increase business user autonomy and provide more advanced self-service tools that are able to drive insights while keeping end users engaged.

With this change to business-friendly software, the perception of value that companies get from modern BI solutions is much higher, making it a more appealing alternative than the legacy software available in the market. In the years to come, most business users and analysts in organizations will switch to modern BI platforms and self-service tools that allow them to prepare data for analysis in more flexible ways.

A direct response to the new BI users is how vendors are transforming their BI offerings from IT-led enterprise reporting to business-led self-service analytics. The changes made to align with evolving business needs have resulted in a reshuffling of the vendor landscape, which was especially significant between 2015 and 2016, as the Gartner study shows.

The technology research firm assessed vendors according to five use cases (Agile Centralized BI Provisioning, Decentralized Analytics, Governed Data Discovery, Embedded BI and Extranet Deployment) and 14 critical capabilities, which were grouped into four sections (Infrastructure, Data Management, Analysis and Content Creation, and Sharing of Findings). The report is well worth reading, since it also gives an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each and every vendor.

As a result of this massive reorganisation, Microsoft has strengthened its position in the Leaders Quadrant with a strong uptake since the latest release (Microsoft BI platform has been ranked as a leader in the BI space by Gartner for the last 9 years). On the other hand, legacy vendors are no longer present in the Magic Quadrant.

A growing market that brings IT services-related opportunities

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast (data from 2015), worldwide big data and business analytics revenue will grow from almost $122 billion in 2015 to more than $187 billion in 2019, an increase of more than 50% over the five-year forecast period.

The services-related opportunity will account for more than half of all big data and business analytics revenue for most of the forecast period, with IT Services generating more than three times the annual revenues of Business Services.

In second place comes software, which is expected to generate more than $55 billion in revenues in 2019. The sources of nearly half of these revenues will be End-User Query, Reporting, Analysis Tools and Data Warehouse Management Tools.

From the perspective of the opportunity for businesses using BI, in an earlier study from IDC and Microsoft, the impact of data on business was explored. After surveying more than 2,000 companies, IDC found that there are two categories of businesses: organizations that have taken a leadership position when it comes to data; and those that are not making the best use of data. The leaders -those companies that embraced data- derived significantly more dividends from those investments in data - from increased revenue, improved productivity, and reduced costs.

The Democratization of Business Intelligence on the Cloud

The market is booming and the profile of Business Intelligence consumers has changed. The use of new BI tools developed to answer the business-oriented demand has opened the door to professionals who want to play with large sets of information and get better data visualization without having to be proficient in IT. Gone are the days when employees had to reach out to the IT department to ask for a report and dump the data into a spreadsheet. Perhaps they would even log into a BI system to get a dashboard, but everything was static and was kept at the individual level of each computer.

With the whole new range of self-service visualization and interactive BI solutions that put advanced analytics at the fingertips of business professionals, practically every employee with a certain degree of analytical skills is able to integrate data-driven decision making into their daily work.

Besides the non-technologists, a growing number of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) are opting for Cloud-based BI. Advanced BI is no longer within the reach of the very few and SMBs are seizing the opportunity to adopt cost-effective BI solutions that can provide a competitive advantage for companies of any size. Cloud-base BI fits in very well with SMBs’ ambitions to grow their business.

Power BI. An enhanced Cloud-based solution

Data is the new currency and companies that make the best possible use of their data and analytics investments are proven to accomplish more valued business outcomes compared to companies that do not.

Microsoft’s Power BI solution offers a simple, intuitive experience for interacting with data. It helps business users to visualize and analyse data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through easy-to-use dashboards, provides interactive reports, and delivers compelling visualizations that bring data to life.

In 2015 the Microsoft team published the useful whitepaper - Bring your data to life with Power BI, Power BI Whitepaper. The paper is designed to orient BI and IT professionals to the key features and benefits of Power BI, and gives an easy-to-follow overview of a tool that can come in handy for Power BI sellers to complement the sales pitch and assist prospects with the waypoints of their digital migration.

The tool is constantly improved with updates released approximately every three weeks (see the latest update of Power BI, September 2016). Microsoft is determined to make Power BI services shine in the analytics landscape, and, as a result of these efforts, the platform is clearly getting traction among enterprises who are looking to enhance their BI Cloud solutions. The latest important addition to the Microsoft Cloud and Power BI portfolio of customers is HP, with whom it recently signed a six-year Cloud deal. This represents an opportunity for IT partners willing to seize the business analytics and intelligence market area that is continuing to expand.

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