A Mobile Democracy

Fewer vendors, less licence revenue but more users. That’s the unique situation in the business intelligence (BI) market right now. Very few niche players remain to be gobbled up by the giants, but current licence revenues are dropping on average as BI becomes more democratised and moves onto more desktops.

What does it mean for the future of BI? And what about the race to provide decent mobile BI applications? Will the cellphone become the BI dashboard platform of choice?

On the democratisation question, Goran Dragosavac, BI practice lead at SAS, says it’s a good thing. “Today, with a few clicks, someone can create a very advanced data model. Of course, it still needs interpretation and implementation but it is a big step forward in analytics.”

Hedley Hurwitz, MD of Magix Integration, says the front-end may be turning into a commodity but what he’s seen of the back-end certainly isn’t.

“The challenge around the front-end and the presentation layer is that it’s being democratised,” says Hurwitz, “but getting the information correct at the back-end is getting more complex.”

Read More of Paul Furber’s Blog Post on ITWeb