Although the opportunity to have useful information remains the ideal, in practice, the actual number of employees getting their hands on BI, or opting to use it, is still quite low across companies, says Gartner’s Sallam. “Despite companies’ spending [collectively] $14.4 million on these tools, when we actually survey companies about what percentage of [their] people use the tools, that percentage is below 30 percent. So the challenge is, how do we get analytics in the hands of more and more users?”
To reach that goal, large vendors, such as SAP, Oracle, IBM and MicroStrategy have to adapt their enterprise solutions to be more flexible and accessible, and smaller players like Birst, Tableau and Tibco need to continue building their brands as providers of user-friendly interactive data exploration applications at a price point even small firms can afford. In the meantime, it seems that no CEO can afford to ignore the BI wave, regardless of company size or industry. As Peters points out, those who recognized data as a competitive weapon a decade ago are reaping rewards today. “There is no way Walmart would be what it is today if it had not embraced data warehousing the way it did back then. The ones able to get their fingers on the right information to tweak and manage business to a level of performance that takes them above their peers over time—they win.”
Related Articles:
Harnessing the Power of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence’s Bounty: How to Choose a Vendor?
A Study in Business Intelligence Vendor Selection