Mobile Analytics - A Game Changer!

Mobile Analytics (a.ka. Mobile BI) has been the hottest strategic topic and a top focus for many enterprise software organizations as customers, small and large, grapple with the big data onslaught and throw everything at it to become even more efficient, both on top-line growth and bottom-line optimization, in an economy struggling to grow and a continent unable to stop a contagion from spreading and once again threatening the global economy.  

Customer's perennial struggle and in-turn a cost-saving approach translates into big analytics opportunity for enterprise software companies to shift customers from traditional analytics solutions to Mobile and Cloud based analytics solutions.

On the premise explained above, I did a business case about 9 months ago to develop a FULL picture of Mobile Analytics market.  I used a ton of research and analyst reports and interviews and invested upwards of hundreds of hours to develop and present a complete story on Mobile Analytics including developing my own proprietary models related to assessing the size of this opportunity. 

I am summarizing my findings at a very high level in following bullet points and have made available the synthesis slides on slideshare (link is printed below).

• Big Data - According to IDC, data is doubling every two years and is expected to reach 1.8 ZB (a trillion GB) in 2011.
• Eight mobility related mega trends are locked in a virtuous cycle and will be the bedrock for growth and adoption of Mobile BI solutions and for  the overall Enterprise Mobility.
• Mobile BI market could grow at 20% plus CAGR over the next 5 years and could likely become over a $2 billion market by 2015.
• According to Gartner, more than 33% of Analytics will be consumed using mobile devices, a prediction well supported by the 8 mobility related mega trends discussed here.
• Therefore, by 2015 more than 15% of Analytics revenues could come from Mobile Analytics solutions. This should be a serious strategic priority for every Analytics vendor if not already.
• Advanced Analytics including geo-spatial for  Mobile Consumers is growing as computing power and form factor of mobile devices change rapidly. 
• Shift to “active production model” from a “passive consumption model”  is expected to happen allowing mobile business users to assemble dashboards and produce/edit reports on the go.

Download slides from Slideshrae - Mobile Analytics (Mobile BI) - A Game Changer

Special thanks goes to Gartner, IDC, Boris Evelson of Forrester, Cindy Howson of BI Scorecard, and Howard Dresner of Dresner Advisory Services for producing excellent research on this topic and answering all my questions and to all my colleagues and friends across the world. 

Upcoming blog on Agile Analytics

Closing the loop on Pervasive Location Analytics - an enlightening personal journey for sure!

When I started working on Google Maps deal at SAP in February of this year, I had no clue where it will end and what is next once the deal is done. I fell in love with this Location Analytics/Geo Data Visualization topic, and turned it into an opportunity to discuss this topic and also generate excitement in various different camps along the way.

Five sessions spread across three continents, 200+ attendees,1000 views and numerous downloads later, this topic became more than just a personal interest. I met great people along the way and worked with very smart and driven people to co-present from the likes of Ryan from Centigon Solutions, Nimish from FreshDirect and Brendan from ThinkSmart Technologies. (See links to slides and session evaluation below)

A proud moment arrived this morning when an alert from SlideShare popped up indicating that this topic is hot on Facebook and as a result this topic is being put on SlideShare home page. Wow!


Pervasive Location Analytics: The Next Frontier to Fall in The Enterprise Software?

Session Evaluations Results

Thank you - my next two blogs will be presenting my thoughts on Moblie Analytics and Agile BI - two topics I have spent significant amount of time from strategy, market, customer, competition and product point of view.

Does your company have a BI implementation plan? Consider this statistics:

• According to market research firm IDC, annual data generation will reach 35 zettabytes or about 35 million petabytes by 2020. 
• That is enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars, or 17.5 million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States. 
• As a result, business intelligence has become an eight billion dollar industry and continues to increase each year. Global Industry Analysts released a report in July projecting the BI software market will reach $12.4 billion by 2015.
•  In May, Forrester came out with a report on the state of the BI industry, finding 49 percent of companies are planning a BI project in 2010 or soon after.

I think that the BI market is expected to be bigger than what IDC is projecting based on my own experience, analysis, research trends and continuous work with BI think-tanks. There are lot of other trends like location analytics and predictive which will make BI even more pervasive in next 2-3 years. 

Now, this ties pretty neatly into my earlier blogs on Big Data and huge amount of innovation happening in this space. Keep blogging... (See my blog entry from February 2010)

A crowded Mobile Analytics (Mobile BI) Competitive Landscape - Is the opportunity really that big?

Quite a few challengers in the market. The following list is a just a first stab at the number of companies looking to capture a piece of the action. The Mobile Analytics market is going to be a big opportunity which also nicely ties into the Big Data story and the Enterprise Mobility trend. More on the size of the opportunity and mobile analytics trends later. For now enjoy this graphics I built using the Dresner study -

Also see the magic quadrant from Gartner on BI. Some overlap between the companies on the two graphics indicating that there are new challengers on the market like LogiXML and Bitam. See my earlier blog on HTML 5 on LogiXML - 

Fast Emerging, Developing and Developed Trends in Business Intelligence (BI)

1. Emerging - Social and Collaborative
2. Developing - Location Analytics (Augmented Reality for Mobile Devices)
3. Developed - Mobile

Facilitators:
- Huge amount of investment in collaborative software to optimize performance
- One obvious one - explosion in Mobile device and heterogeneous devices are accepted in the organization
- Strong desire to tie the analytics to its source, where did the event happen - zero in on the location. 

I get to live, rationalize, strategize, visualize, evangelize and everything else to influence build real BI solutions.
More on this in my follow up blogs, for now, enjoy following excerpts from a Gartner report -
....
Within two years, 15% of BI deployments will combine collaborative and social decision making-environments.
....
With the rapid development of handheld functionality and mass adoption rates across enterprises, by 2014 33% of business intelligence will be through mobile devices. 
....
Source: Gartner Predicts Business Intelligence Will Go Mobile and Social

Growing Bigger - QlikView Faces Headwinds? One Analysts Thinks That is the Case.

QlikView (Ticker: QLIK)  has been a poster child of BI since 2006 growing at a record double digit pace and becoming the envy of many large BI players (by not direct competing with them but still out-pacing on sales and customer growth). Many executives at large firms (un)proudly speak of QlikView as a strong competitor. Pretty good achievement!

 Take a look at the following graphics below that captures all company vitals - 

As QLIK grows, it faces an interesting challenge as faced by every company standing at the gates on an inflection point - transitioning to a larger company. Here are some of the issues identified by identified by Gartner for QLIK - ( I am pretty confident that QLIK will continue to execute well in near-term but it definitely has to resolve all of these issues mentioned below) 

QlikTech offers limited metadata management. As QlikView grows into larger BI deployments spanning the enterprise, the lack of an enterprise semantic layer becomes a more pressing issue. Filling this gap requires additional cost and effort in the management of metadata to lock down common definitions and calculations, and to conform dimensions for cross-functional analysis across QlikView applications.

QlikTech's focus on analysis and usability for end users delivers significant advantages. However, its lack of a number of broad BI platform capabilities (high volume enterprise reporting, planning/financially oriented OLAP, Microsoft Office integration, scorecarding and predictive modelling) means that it will almost always need to be used alongside another BI platform.

QlikView is increasingly seen as expensive — almost a third of its customers surveyed (31.4% vs. 26.1% in the whole sample) see this as its main barrier to wider use. Its pricing model often does not sit well with larger deployments to more users, nor does the investment in RAM required to support the increasing numbers of concurrent users.

Business Analytics @ SAP Delivers a Chain of Innovations in Last Six Months!

• In December 2010, SAP launched the SAP® In-Memory Appliance software (SAP HANA™), which lets people analyze huge amounts of data in real time and any level of detail.
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• In February, SAP launched the culmination of three years' development in business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) software to help ensure people base their decisions on real-time information that is reliable, easy to consume and apply, and available on any mobile device.
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• In March, SAP launched solutions to help organizations move governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices out of the hands of a few so everyone in the organization can participate in mitigating risk and helping to increase corporate compliance.
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• Beginning in fall 2010, SAP introduced its family of SAP® BusinessObjects™ analytic applications and has continued to build out the portfolio for specific industries and lines of business.

The 10.0 release of EPM complements these tools by helping organizations ensure that central corporate strategy and an understanding of risk guide all decisions and actions. This enables companies to achieve goals with greater speed and fewer resources. 

Full Press Release - SAP Opens Next Chapter of Business Analytics Vision With Enterprise Performance Management Solutions

The Era of Big Data is Upon us!

No kidding - if you didn't know this already, read this article from The Economist - Data, data everywhere.

Here are some mind boggling stats from that article:

• Wal-Mart handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.
• Facebook is home to 40 billion photos.
• Decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week. (May be few hours now with SAP's HANA)

Another interesting insight The Economist:

Only 5% of the information that is created is “structured”, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers. The rest are things like photos and phone calls which are less easily retrievable and usable. But this is changing as content on the web is increasingly “tagged”, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.

So, what does this all mean? Opportunity for incumbent companies which offer software tools to analyze world's structured and unstructured data. Companies like SAP, IBM, Oracle, Informatica of the world find themselves in the eye of the storm. This is the decade of big data and enterprise mobility that means big opportunity for lot of software and hardware companies.

I will be publishing blogs on the topic of Enterprise Mobility and Mobile Business Analytics going forward and will be looking forward to collaborating with other visionaries out there to spread the word on Mobile Business Analytics.

So Long!