Remembering Gartner’s predictions for a $16.5 billion-heavy BI industry for the current year, there is absolutely no reason to doubt another round of paramount growth in the data-driven Business in 2017. From what analysts are forecasting now, big data goals are already embedded in many companies’ agenda, and slowly yet surely, they start to reflect on business outcomes we can expect 12 months from now.
As Datameer’s cofounder and Computer Science professor Ajay Anand and Impetus Head of Production Anand Venugopal explain, 2017 will be a stepping stone enabling Business Intelligence to gain the momentum industries have never seen before.
In short, BI software has so far miraculously transformed the corporate environment, and imposed itself as the main competitive metric to distinguish excellent players from mediocre and poor ones. What we believe was the biggest benefit of such improvement is facing small and midmarket companies with the fact that underperformance is not always someone else’s fault. And they better deal with it soon.
How 2016 affected small players in the BI industry
2016 brought up some of the most prominent business intelligence software trends. Vendors released a number of products that are affordable yet capable of massive with incredible storage capacity, and ensured those would be available even to smaller companies to boost growth and gain actionable insights. What was particularly striking during this process was the inclusion of new interactive data such as social tweets, videos, and IoT. As some of you will recall, closely 80% of this data was not even structured for analysis by that time, and there were no indications it could ever be exported to classic BI systems.
But, here we are. Looking at the FinancesOnline list of leading business intelligence companies in the market in 2016, we are actually exploring a world of unlimited possibilities for the future. BI software of today is heavily equipped to undertake all types of analyses, leverage industry data and gauge corporate assets, and is most of all fully enabled to answer the ‘what’s wrong?’ question each time data brainers fail to produce results. What businesses usually like the most about new BI software systems is how they handle assets and capital, rather than plainly controlling leads and extracting practices from their behavior. The rule of today is: all or nothing at all.
Our experts, nevertheless, still lean on the organizational side as the main incentive for BI growth. Systems of today handle unstructured data coming from hundreds of sources, and that’s exactly the state of art we are discussing. Plus, the business intelligence tools you’d purchased in 2016 had definitely been ecosystem-adjusted, mature for flexible deployment, and accessible to non-savvy beginners rather than managers and professionals. And yes – that’s exactly how small companies like it served!
Another thing 2016 taught us to do is to put quality before quantity, which is why we are no longer analyzing whatever comes into our hands. It may be common sense or a product of the Data Provocateur concept forecasted for 2017, but it seems executives are only going to be pickier and more selective. No one can blame them for it, though – if you go back to 2008’s financial crisis, the first thing that will draw your attention is how it was inaccurate mortgage and loan data that led some countries to the edge of bankruptcy. The secret is, Anand reminds, to work with the data you already have, as modest, limited, or terrifying as it may be.
