What Is the Future of Business Intelligence? 123
Roland Piquepaille writes "Mitch Betts asked this question to many technology leaders in the field of business intelligence. Here is one selected prediction. 'In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year,' says Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Check this column for more forecasts and an update on the adoption of so-called 'executive dashboards.' You also can read the original Computerworld article for even more information."
Business Intelligence (Score:3, Informative)
Do I believe it is a large industry with a lot of spending, yes I do. Especially in these times where businesses are attempting to optimize their processes and reduce spending. Decision support systems through Business Intelligence are a big aide to those in charge.
Regards,
Tom Wolniewicz; BMath, CS, OCP
tom@fieldofwebs.com
Inxight does have cool stuff (Score:4, Informative)
Not to make too big of a shameless plug, but my www.knowledgebooks.com stuff tries to be sort-of competitive with Inxight (although I have just been working on this stuff about 1/3 time for a few years - I will acknowledge that they have a head start :-).
I really believe that most people will routinely use what I would call information appliances - systems that basically remember our entire digital lives and provide ways to quickly find information based on topic, time of creation/modification, linked from other similar data or experiences, etc.
One huge problem that I have as a developer (as I have recently talked about on my blog) is that if you are not Microsoft and can not peek inside proprietary data and file formats, then you have a difficult time writing software that runs in the background and has access to everything that you are doing on your computer. Storage, information retrieval, backups, etc. are all solveable problems, but proprietary data formats used by > 90% of the desktop market are a major problem.
One possible idea would be integration with OpenOffice and live with a small market share.
-Mark
Re:Interactive Reporting (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who spends to much time using Cognos' stuff and BusinessObjects, the one thing I can tell these things lack is decent charting. Excel has them both beat here and in the end its charts the bosses look at not the tables.
Re:An old favorite (Score:2, Informative)