Enterprises are challenged by a phenomenal increase in the volume of business data and ever-shortening timeframes in which to process and analyze it.
Budgetary pressures and resource constraints also mean that IT departments cannot keep up with the flood of business intelligence change requests. In addition, organizations are coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny, which shines a bright spotlight on data governance.
In Ovum’s latest decision matrix, "Selecting a Business Intelligence Vendor," the independent analyst firm reveals that while the need for BI continues to grow, the diversity, volume, and speed of data thrown at BI solutions have increased significantly over last year.
“To keep delivering even the same level of insights as a decade ago, BI vendors and their solutions need to be more agile and adaptive than ever," said Surya Mukherjee, senior analyst at Ovum. "Agility must go beyond simply making existing BI infrastructures run faster. It must also encompass elements of self-service, mobility and collaboration."
Given that the core BI market is fairly consolidated, the major vendors now offer a mature portfolio of products built through years of acquisitions and integrations. As a result, most vendors claim to possess similar core BI functionality, the report says.
In addition, over the past year, most vendors have jumped on buzzword bandwagons around Big Data, Fast Data, and mobile BI. These factors have further complicated the BI selection problem.
“The overall market appears to be recording healthy growth rates in spite of the fears of a double-dip recession in Europe and reduced investor confidence in global financial markets," Mukherjee said. "A large part of this growth is driven by new license revenue and not merely maintenance and services. This reflects the expansion of BI deployments from departmental to organizational, the constant change in analytic goalposts, and continuing investment in newer analytic technologies."
