Several industry analysts from different organisations have all picked the last several weeks as a good time to comment on the current and future growth in the domestic market for business intelligence (BI). Frost & Sullivan analyst Foad Fadaghi said of the BI market at last weekend's KickStart conference in Queensland that "all vendors have had double digit growth in the last 12 months" and that the area is sure to heat up in the next twelve months.
Also speaking at the conference, Gartner senior vice-president and manager of Australasian operations Bob Hayward listed "Business intelligence, not as a stand-alone product, but embedded in database/CRM/ERP solutions" as one the items on his list of hot technologies that will be making waves in Australia in 2005.
And Bruce McCabe, who bills himself as "Australia's most respected technology analyst", agrees. On the 22nd February of this year, Bruce supported the launch of new products from one of those vendors with double digit growth, Cognos Intelligence, saying: "In everything I do in my research - business analysis seems to be at the top of my list."
The growth, according to McCabe, is bring driven by several factors. Firstly, BI vendors in the market have developed better interfaces for their software. Secondly, such companies are getting an "awful lot better" at integration and tying data sources together. This, coupled with a focus on low-cost platforms such as Linux on x86 CPUs has led to a move of BI from boutique or niche areas to a more general market.
Speaking at the same launch, Cognos marketing and alliances director David Merchant said that the demand for BI was also shifting "from historical to real-time data tracking". Merchant cited the examples of efficiencies gained from the use of BI in organisations like Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried, who not only used BI to analyse their stock levels but also their staff needs.
Although "most people are already doing some sort of analytics" on their data, said McCabe, they weren't getting the best results out of that analysis. But Gartner's Hayward disagreed. While "the average enterprise is probably storing 30 percent more data each year," Hayward said, "most enterprises don't look at that data. It's an analysis game, and it's going to get worse. The amount of electronic traces is going to expand dramatically. And only rudimentary, cursory analysis is being performed for the most part. The amount of real insight is not where it should be."
According to Hayward at least, "CIOs are looking for innovation and to drive growth from it [BI]." Hayward said earlier on in February of this year that the primary agenda for most CIOs over the last three years has been on cost reduction. This year, however, he referred to Gartner surveys indicate a shift, concluding that CIOs would look toward finding "high-quality IT services in line with business cost expectations, increasing the quality and use of intelligence in processes, products and services, and improving, integrating and innovating business processes."
While the analysts may agree between themselves that BI is one technology that will strongly influence corporations in 2005, Steve Hitchman from Australian data management consultancy Management Information Principles (MIP) is one data management expert that has a different view on the situation. Hitchman, who also spoke at Kickstart, said that while opportunities to analyse the vast silos of data that may exist out there in Australian companies do exist, that data may in fact be useless as "75 percent of data in organisations in Australia is wrong".
Hitchman cited the example of databases full of customer records with outdated addresses or phone numbers. MIP, he said, was in the business of fixing "data cemeteries" as opposed to working in data warehousing. A focus on data quality is highly important for organisations moving towards the use of BI in their systems, according to Hitchman.
