Soon Self-service BI, SaaS to dominate the tech world

Bangalore: Majority of the enterprises will increasingly look for opportunities to tap self-service business intelligence systems and SaaS-based BI offerings in 2011. According to the analysts at Forrester Research, other items that are also likely to be high on the enterprise agenda include technologies that enable businesses to do more real-time analysis of large data volumes, social media analytics, and mobile BI.

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Numerous vendors, including IBM, SAP, Information Builders, Tibco Software, QlikTech, and Tableau Software, already offer such tools, and adoption will accelerate as more companies try to deliver BI capabilities to nontechnical users, business analysts, and others.

The increasing availability of BI tools provided on a software-as-a-service basis will also drive more self-service BI and enable wider adoption of BI usage in general, Kobielus said. One example of a company that is taking advantage of SaaS BI is New York-based women's apparel maker Bernard Chaus Inc. The company is using a BI application to track the performance of its products at each of the high-end department store chains that sell them.

In another development in the BI market, expect enterprise interest in the open-source Hadoop framework to increase significantly next year. Vendors such as IBM, Pentaho, Cloudera and Karmasphere already offer enterprise-ready Hadoop implementations, and analysts expect more vendors and more products to join the list in 2011.

Emerging new search and discovery technologies from companies like Attivio and Endeca will also start making a bigger impression in enterprise environments next year.Such tools are designed to enable companies to implement user-configurable, search-based business intelligence applications involving large volumes of structured and unstructured data.