On Demand
Cloud computing is a major trend that offers advantages in terms of flexibility, dynamic scalability, and agility. Even so, there’s been a lot of marketing hype. The reality is that, until recently, cloud has been slow to take off for business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Organizations have been concerned about security, performance, functionality, and other critical issues. TDWI Research is now seeing a significant shift as more organizations show willingness to experiment with BI and analytics in the cloud and are moving into deployment.
Fern Halper, Ph.D., David Stodder
Sponsored by
Cloudera, IBM, Informatica Corporation, SAP, SAS, Snowflake, Tableau Software
Big data presents significant business opportunities, when leveraged properly. And yet, big data also presents significant business and technology risks, when it is poorly governed or managed.
Philip Russom, Ph.D.
Sponsored by
Talend
One of the strongest trends in information technology (IT) today is self service, which puts the power of creating data-driven solutions in the hands of the business user. This way, IT organizations are offloaded; they needn’t create unique datasets, reports, and analyses per user, which frees up IT’s time for other tasks. Furthermore, a broad range of end-users – mostly mildly technical business people – needn’t wait for help from IT, thereby giving them greater agility and creativity, while reducing the time to value and allowing them to apply their business expertise to a well-targeted solution. Therefore, self service is a win-win situation – but only if key pieces of technology are in place.
Philip Russom, Ph.D.
Sponsored by
Bit Stew Systems
One of the hottest trends today is self-service data preparation. Following the path of front-end tools for self-service business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics, self-service data preparation is aimed at providing nontechnical business users with the ability to explore data and choose data sets to fit their BI and analytics requirements. The goal is to reduce IT hand-holding—an ambitious one considering that, according to TDWI research, in most organizations IT manages nearly all data preparation steps, which can include data ingestion and collection, data transformation, data quality improvement, and data integration. Self-service data preparation thus represents a significant and potentially destabilizing change for IT and the way that IT and business work together.
David Stodder
Sponsored by
SAP and Intel
As the data warehouse environment (DWE) continues to evolve, one of its strongest trends is the diversification of data platforms. A rigorously structured relational data warehouse is still at the heart of the DWE, but it is being joined more and more by other platform types, including data platforms based on columns, appliances, graph, streaming data, and open source.
Philip Russom, Ph.D.
Sponsored by
SAP
“Throw the baby out with the bathwater!”
We hear that a lot. Changing business environments and competitive pressures have driven companies to seek a new edge from innovative technologies such as specialized data stores and the cloud. Today’s business intelligence (BI) and analytics implementation experts face disruptive decisions as they strive to support their business users’ shifting and diverse analytical needs. Increasing volumes and sources of data (on premises and in the cloud), technology adoption, more complex data integration and quality issues, and lower data latencies are just a few of the challenges that must be addressed.
Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D.
Sponsored by
TDWI and IBM Content
Firms in financial services and many other industries are under pressure to improve efficiency, productivity, and decision-making power. For both daily operational and strategic decisions, organizations need to draw insights quickly from quality data so that they can understand and act on changes in markets, regulations, operations, customer behavior, fraud patterns, and the competitive landscape. Financial services firms need to be smarter and faster to survive in an industry where business models are changing and old ways of managing risk are out of date.
David Stodder
Sponsored by
Sisense