Published on the 13/03/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Data discovery capabilities are dominating new BI and analytics purchasing requirements, but ‘governed data discovery’ remains a challenge unmet by any one vendor…
The recent Gartner Business Intelligence Summit held in Sydney highlighted significant growth in the (BI) platforms market in Asia Pacific, with the Australian BI platform software market remaining the region’s biggest in the next few years, reaching $US386.2 million in 2014 (up 5.4 percent over last year) and growing to US$443.5 million in 2017. In New Zealand, the BI market is expected to grow 5.6 percent to US$50 million (NZ$61.7 million) in 2014 and US$55.8 million in 2017.
It also said that while organisations are rapidly moving from BI systems used primarily for measurement and reporting to those that also support analysis, prediction, forecasting and optimisation, there is a gap in the market for a solution that can meet the dual demands of enterprise IT and business users.
Gartner analysts said that while the “megavendors” SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have the lion’s share of the market and are preferred by IT executives, business units increasingly prefer data discovery solutions, such as Tibco Spotfire, QlikTech and Tableau Software.
The results of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, (revealed at the Summit) illustrated business’s trend towards using, and even standardising on, data discovery platforms for their larger enterprise BI deployments. In many cases, however, the research firm said that existing data discovery platforms lack the necessary enterprise features in relation to governance, administration and scalability while the incumbent leaders, are strong in IT-led systems-of-record enterprise capabilities, but have had limited success in delivering “good enough” data discovery capabilities for business users.
Gartner says “the race is on to fill the gap in ‘governed data discovery’” — in other words, platforms that address both business users’ requirements for ease of use and enterprises’ IT-driven requirement.
A number of vendors are working towards improving their offerings in this area and Gartner highlighted SAS as having made “one of the boldest moves of any vendor with its plans to replace its current enterprise BI platform (where it is integrated across the rest of its application and decision management stack) with Visual Analytics, a new data discovery environment, as its ‘go forward’ BI platform”.
The Quadrant also highlights advances in self-service data integration, which offers a view of the next generation of ‘smart’ data discovery and data preparation. Meanwhile, cloud BI is becoming more acceptable, with 45 percent of respondents (compared with approximately 30 percent for each of the last four years) saying they would put their mission-critical BI in the cloud.
Gartner said that growth in Australia’s BI platform software market is driven by maintenance and new license revenue, with many clients in Australia looking at vendor consolidation as part of their overall BI competency centre initiatives. The mid-market is also showing healthy signs of BI technology adoption. The New Zealand BI market will be sustained through maintenance revenue and BI investments made by government departments. New Zealand also continues to be a test bed for the launch of major technologies in the Asia Pacific region because of its technology-savvy population.
