1. Voice Driven Business Intelligence 

Apples Siri has taken the Apple mobile community by storm.  In addition, it has driven competitors, namely Microsoft, Google and others to respond in some form or fashion. Furthermore, developer oriented entrepreneurs have been firing up “Siri Proxy Servers”  and alternatives to enable teams of engineers to experiment with alternative ways of taking advantage of Siri and Siri like capabilities. In some cases, these initial experiments have been targeted at controlling your cable box or television. What we will likely see is mechanisms for driving business intelligence queries via interactive voice response. Just think “What are my total sales for the north east region this month”? Siri responds: “At this point that number is calculated to be 1,320,00″ and even may present a chart / graph or two to reinforce the voice response with the data to back it up.

We believe that Apple should make available an SDK for Siri so that third parties can help Apple build  a new voice driven ecosystem including the business intelligence community. We can also imagine all sorts of interesting engaging business apps using Siri in the future. Other players have created alternatives to Siri and also powered by the popular voice tools that seem to power everything from your cars console to your future refrigerator. Toolkits from the voice players might create good opportunities for software vendors looking to add voice based interfaces to their products.

Although mobile options for business intelligence solutions are becoming mainstream, we believe that over the course of the next 12-24 months, we will see a wide variety of innovations emerging to push voice driven capabilities into the mainstream of business intelligence. We have had voice driven technology for years and years, but Apple is now well positioned to drive it fast forward with Siri.

2. Infographic Tooling Support

We are very excited to see more and more creative and compelling infographics on websites like visual.ly, visualizing.org and flowdata.com, however creating infographics for big data requires some serious “right brain” horsepower. Eventually, the CEO is going to see one that she really likes and asks the question “Why can’t my Business Intelligence Dashboard contain these Infographics” ?? With this in mind, we suspect that a number of business intelligence vendors, will begin to add “infographics tooling” in their product line that make it very simple for business intelligence professional to create infographics that are just as visually appealing as the bubble charts of the past.

3. Contextually Related Business Intelligence Insight

Consumers get “whats related” information on a daily basis as they travel around the internet. This has been in practice for a very long time with consumer technologies including YouTube, iTunes and Amazon. We are also seeing more location based contextual relevant information delivered to the consumer via devices like the iPhone.

Just like general internet consumers, business intelligence users also will begin to expect contextually relevant information as they interact with their dashboards, online reports and analytics applications. The source of this relevant data will come from insight and outside the enterprise data firewall. We also expect these users will want to set their own preference for context also from inside the business and outside the business. This will ensure a better and more relevant experience for the analytic/BI user.

4. Social Fire Hoses Become A New Standard Source Of Data For BI

BI vendors are now adding connectivity to popular social media fire hoses as new data sources, including Twitter and Facebook become important information sources for the enterprise, especially the marketing organizations who watch over social media.

While many social analytics tools have emerged over the past several years, some already acquired and integrated with larger players, most of them are very generic in nature with little competitive differentiation.  Bread and butter business intelligence vendors in 2012 will clearly challenge these generic social analytics tools. These efforts will lead some BI pros to abandon these specialized social analytic tools in favor of their favorite business intelligence tools where they have strong skills and experiences.

5. Crowd Source Enabling BI

Although we have seen many attempts at injecting collaborative features into business intelligence product, we have yet to see anyone crowd source enable their platform. Although we have our ideas on how this might work, we expect BI vendors soon will look at ways to gather the insight from many inside and outside the business to ensure a proper analysis is taking place. “Does anyone know if the numbers associated with that widget is really that low in the supply chain”?

6. BI connected to “The Hadoop of Real Time” – CEP Takes Hold

Complex Event Processing (CEP) has been around for many years. While it has had success, mostly in the financial markets, we believe that tying CEP products to BI products and demonstrating their feasibility will be a catalyst for broader adoption and interest by the enterprise. We expect industry influencers to also make statements about this capability as it aligns with BI.

Already products including DarkStar, Yahoo S4 and Storm from BackType Technologies are showing up on in the CEP market, they have a long way to go from a mainstream adoption perspective but innovators will soon find opportunities to build interesting connections between these products and BI/Visualization tools. Streambase LiveView is a promising example of what can happen when one bridges CEP with BI/Visualization capabilities. Another player in this market is Panopticon, however they rely on third party CEP engines as well as other third party data source. We expect to see others mainstream BI player will follow in 2012.

7. A Set Of Brand New Business Intelligence / Analytic Players

Business Intelligence solutions from the past are feeling complex, bulky and simply old and out of date. You can now bet that a new set of players will quickly emerge who have thought deeply about what a new modern more agile business intelligence / analytic platform should be like in todays big data revolution. We are not talking about solutions like DataMeer, we are thinking in terms of new, new, new. One that seems to be raising a great deal of eyebrows is TideMark who has recently raised a whopping $24 million in fresh A+ venture capital. We expect others to follow as the database / analytic database, data warehouse space is getting very, very busy with lots of players. We believe that now is the time for entrepreneurs to capture the new and changing requirements for the next generation of BI / Analytic solutions.

Thanks for reading our post. We really do appreciate it. Have a great day!

It is clear that the information management vendor community is all over the topic of “Big Data” however,  there is clearly more work that needs to be done to educate the mainstream IT professionals on this subject, the good news, when they have time, there is plenty of “Big Data” information and products to be found with many willing and able to help. Although we suspect, many “Big Data” projects will be outsourced to professional services companies that are growing “Big Data” practices.

It took several years for IT professionals to get up to speed on client/server technologies and the internet when they first emerged. Because we are at the birth of “Big Data”, we will likely see the same as we move through this significant inflection point in this industry.