Business Intelligence Lowdown: What's in Store for BI in 2006?

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January 06, 2006

What's in Store for BI in 2006?

Business Intelligence (BI) is all set to take on a more active role in the world of business rather than just being used in the form of historical reports by statisticians and analysts. With the advent of 2006, the new "operational BI" promises to deliver real-time or near real-time data that can be used by employees on all tiers of a company as a decision-making tool.

Though a few bleeding-edge companies tentatively investigated the idea of the new BI in 2005, Heather Havenstein of Computer World says that more of them will move toward this level by decreasing the transfer time of data from transaction systems to a data warehouse, and by linking BI with Business Process Management (BPM) tools. Companies that move on to operational BI will be able to send fresh data to front-line employees by feeding data directly from transaction systems to a data warehouse. The extract, transform and load tools used traditionally for most BI projects will have to be avoided.

Through alliances with enterprise information integration vendors, BI vendors are now allowing users to secure a single access point across diverse systems to increase the speed of warehouse feeds.

Microsoft Corporation is also worming its way into the BI market by making report building easier for users of SQL Server 2005 who are unfamiliar with the use of Visual Studio programming tools. The global leader also intends to provide added support for developing applications with the Excel front-end tool.

The year 2006 will see more vendors catering to user demands to link BI and BPM so that action can be taken when transaction data falls outside the normal ranges. John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research Inc., says that BI vendors will be under pressure from enterprise application companies like SAP AG and Oracle Corp., which have the ability to link BPM and BI. He also predicts that many BI vendors will align with BPM vendors or acquire their technology.

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January 6, 2006 in Business Intelligence | Permalink