What do you think about the uptake of Business Intelligence in the corporate community?

Nothing promotes the growth of a technology more than observing success. If a competitor gains great value from implementing a BI solution it will naturally create intrigue and interest. What accelerates the growth even faster is experiencing success internally within the company. It’s much easier for a business unit to build on the success achieved by another business unit.

 

How far can you go in BI innovation? Are there only so many sensible ways to deal with data sets?

That’s the interesting thing about BI. Just when you think the vendors have pushed the envelope, here comes another vendor with a fresh perspective on either the problem set or the solution. That’s how BI evolves and its use expands to unique domains. Another thing to realize is that there are always hundreds of ways to go from point A to point B; the raw data maybe the same and the presentation may be the same but the solution to bridge the gap can greatly differ.

 

As you are a veteran in the IT industry you will be keenly observing the day-to-day happenings in this field. Could you please elaborate how IT set its foot and spread its wing across the world?

It’s clear to most organizations that IT is the enabler to achieve business initiatives. A business process without technology is limited and will not scale. As long as IT continues to innovate, its growth will not cease.

 

What about the open source applications, like Pentaho? Are they a competitive threat in the BI market?

Yes and no. Sophisticated BI solutions are not necessary to return value for a large group of users. The open source applications deliver some good functionality and will only get better as the community grows and contributes. There are some good things that will come out of this movement. It may put price pressure on the larger players; vendors may need to spend more effort justifying their value for the price. The second positive is that it will allow smaller companies to gain value. This will not only help the small company but potentially the larger BI players by creating the intrigue to pursue more. How well the open source applications will be able to deliver sophisticated solutions is yet to be seen.

 

Microsoft is dipping more than its big toe in the BI market. What sort of threat are they to both the niche and established players in the market?

Microsoft can always be a threat. You have to look at its impact in the database world with SQL Server. Its technology will always have a good following especially with small and mid-sized companies. They have the unique opportunity to leverage their other technologies, such as the various development languages and SQL Server, to build products that can integrate and can be expandable.

 

What can you tell us about any new features you are excited about in BI?

With BI I personally like the movement towards more visualization. The capabilities that are being introduced to display, graph, slice, drill down and consolidate information and present in personalized dashboards is truly amazing. This opens up the world of BI to a much broader audience.

 

What sort of future do you see for BI?

I don’t know if I can tell where BI is going. I do hope that the tools of the future continue to improve the handling of large amounts of data, i.e. more parallelism and scalability while keeping deployment complexity low. In terms of future developments, look for more creative visualization techniques and tighter integration with products such as CRMs.

 

According to you, what is the emerging trend in IT industry and what more we can expect in the next 5 years?

This is a difficult question to answer. The advances in physical hardware and engineering breakthroughs create new opportunities for software. With the processing power now inherent in phones, PDAs and other handheld devices, software solutions will able to deliver the same content in different ways. Advances in bandwidth and telecommunications also open up opportunities to deliver more content to new consumers. The trend will be expansion of options for delivery of content to larger audiences through unique channels.