Keeping an Eye on Analytics Software Trends
There’s a lot of talk in the trade press about the analytical divide—the gap in capabilities of businesses that use analytics versus those who still rely on management reporting. Much of this discussion involves the applications that can close the divide by adding analytics capabilities to traditional reporting functions.
Four types of applications show up in these discussions: data discovery, real-time streaming event data, Big Data and visual analytics solutions. (We’ll review the first three now and VA next time in Part 2.) Application developers have market-ready products in each of these areas. We’ll take a look at the capabilities that potential IT buyers are looking for.
BI Emphasis Moves to Data Discovery-Based Analytics
A Gartner report predicts that a majority of BI vendors will make data discovery their prime platform offering. This reflects a move from rules-heavy, centralized BI platforms that push reports to users to ad hoc querying and other analytic tools. These tools have generated interest for some time, but they were seen as too difficult to use. More recently, vendors who jumped the ease-of-use barrier have been rewarded with industry praise and hefty sales.
TIBCO Spotfire data discovery software has pioneered in this area with a powerful but easy-to-use platform. The Spotfire approach to data analytics enables business users to find their own answers to business questions. That’s one reason why Spotfire has kept its years-long position in the Leaders part of the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms for 2014.