BI in Action

I just published my list of the "Top 10 Data Management Trends to Watch" for the upcoming year in Database Trends, and thought I would share them with you here.

1 - More industry consolida­tion, acquisitions. The year 2007 saw a number of acquisi­tions and mergers among prominent vendors, including IBM’s announced acquisition of Cognos, SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects and Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion. Expect more of the same in 2008.

2 - Finally, BI with enterprise reach will become more of a reality. “Democratic” BI - accessible to executives and employees throughout the organization, rather than being limited to analysts - has long been an unfulfilled pipe dream within the industry. However, in 2008, this vision may finally begin to be realized.

3 - Business intelligence moves toward performance manage­ment and complex analytics. As BI moves out to the mass­es, there will be increased scrutiny and leveraging of the metrics that drive the business itself.

4 - Business intelligence and analytics will move to real time. In 2007, the industry witnessed a dramatic shift away from historical data analysis to the embracing of real-time analytics. New initiatives such as SOA are also facilitating this movement to real-time BI.

5 - SOA and integration will grow as enterprise IT activities. The need for speed of delivery has put SOA front and center on everyone's mind.

6 - Mashups and Web 2.0 will rise within enterprise walls. Due to the rapid pro­liferation of consumer-facing mashup applications, the demand for customized, collaborative-oriented applications is making its way into the enterprise.

7 - More companies will embrace soft­ware- as-a-service (SaaS). Many observers consider the SaaS phenome­non as a vital piece of Web 2.0.

8 - Managing more with less, and align­ing more with the business. Managing more with less is a trend that never goes out of style, and this will especially be the case in 2008.

9 - More server and storage virtualiza­tion. Virtualization is hot for a number of reasons, and extends across a number of parts of the enterprise. Virtualization will also be increasingly used to manage the storage piece of the enterprise.

10 - Data and IT governance will become urgent requirements. Data governance has typically been limited to policies and enforcement, but the emphasis will broaden over the coming year, shaping IT infrastructures.