Influential Business Intelligence Blogs

In(tegrate) the Clouds was named as one of the 23 most influential business intelligence blogs today by Justin Heinze at BI Software Insight.  It’s a great list to be a part of – thanks Justin! It’s also helpful to get the Twitter handles of all of the bloggers.

Here’s the list, in no particular order I don’t think:

• TechnoSocial Blog
• Smart Data Collective
• BI Analysis
• In(tegrate) the Clouds
• Upstream Info
• AllformZ BI Blog
• Forbes Blog: Bruno Aziza and The Tribulations of an Analytical Mind
• B-Eye Network Channel: BI & Integration – Colin White
• Business Intelligence
• Business Intelligence and Cultural Transformation: Peter James Thomas
• Key 2 Consulting
• Business Intelligence Products and Trends and B-eye Network Blog: Barney Finucane
• The Data Doghouse
• Meta Analysis
• Ms. SQL Girl
• Business Analytics News
• Business Intelligence: Process, People, and Products
• Decideo.fr: Francophone Community of Business Intelligence Users
• BI Scorecard
• TDWI: Business Intelligence Portal
• Ventana Research: Perspectives by David Menninger
• James Kobelius’ Blog

You can read the entire post with all of the links here. You can read more of my posts about cloud data and application integration on the SnapLogic blog.

Talking Cloud, Mobile, Collaborative Analytics with Howard Dresner

This week I participated in an interactive webinar with Tidemark, SnapLogic and Howard Dresner. Howard reviewed some of the early findings from his annual Wisdom of the Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study – 2014 Edition, with a particular focus on Cloud, Mobile and Collaborative Analytics. It’s always great to get his perspective on the changing landscape of business intelligence and analytics.

I’ll post a few notes from the discussion on the SnapLogic blog this week. In the meantime, here’s the recording:

Better Business Analytics in the Cloud

I moderated a SnapLogic webinar today focused on the market shift to business intelligence, analytics and enterprise performance management delivered in the cloud. We discussed the trends, shared some industry analyst perspectives and demonstrated the importance of cloud integration to an overall business analytics as a service strategy. Here’s the presentation. You can watch the recording when it’s posted here. As always, feedback welcome.

Here are some of the links referenced in the presentation:

• What’s Driving the Shift to On-Demand BI
• Gartner predicts Business Intelligence and Analytics will Remain the Top Focus for CIOs through 2017
• Insights from Findings in Dresner Advisory Services’ 2013 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study
• Big Business Intelligence Trends for 2014
• Petabyte Scale Data Warehousing with Amazon Redshift
• Business Intelligence Advances Into the Cloud with Some Caveats
• BI in the Cloud: Find Your Bliss
• SnapLogic Named EMA Vendor to Watch
• Ovum on the Radar: SnapLogic

2014 Cloud Integration Predictions from @SnapLogic

Maneesh Joshi from SnapLogic shared his 2014 cloud integration predictions last week. They are:

1. iPaaS makes ESBs obsolete
2. API management and iPaaS jointly displace Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in enterprise IT
3. IT dinosaurs face extinction; the citizen developer emerges
4. Digital Marketing platforms take over the world
5. The rise of the cloud data warehouse

Here’s a powerpoint overview:

Related articles

• SOA’s second life as enterprise API and other 2014 predictions (zdnet.com)
• iPaaS Allows Companies to Integrate Based on Need (tibco.com)

Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends in 2014 from Tableau

I like how Tableau created a web page and slideshare presentation for their 2014 business intelligence predictions. I also like their predictions. Here they are, with a few comments.

1. The end of data scientists (does that mean data artisans too?)
2. Cloud business intelligence goes mainstream (I guess I was a little early on that one – here’s an interesting cloud BI survey)
3. Big data finally goes to the sky (go Redshift!)
4. Predictive analytics goes mainstream (hmmm…I still remember “Data Mining for the Masses” circa 1998 with BusinessObjects Business Miner)
5. Agile BI extends its lead (is there one BI vendor that doesn’t call their tools agile?)
6. Embedded BI begins to emerge (Good news for JasperSoft, given they’ve been talking about this for years.)
7. Story telling becomes a priority (In other words, stop talking speeds and feeds and discuss outcomes – as suggested recently by Ken Rudin)
8. Mobile BI becomes the primary experience (Michael Saylor has to be happy about this prediction – has anyone read The Mobile Wave?)
9. Organizations begin to analyst social data in earnest (Is Earnest was a new flavor or Hadoop?)
10. NoSQL is the new Hadoop (not sure what the angle here is for Tableau, but sure.)

Here’s the presentation with more details.

Related articles

• Predicting Big Data’s 2014 (zdnet.com)

The Shift to Cloud Business Intelligence

In 2006 I posted a presentation on Slideshare called, “What is Driving the Shift to On-Demand BI?“ While it might have been a little early in terms of cloud business intelligence adoption, looking at it today shows that most of the industry analyst predictions were actually quite conservative when it comes to cloud adoption in the enterprise. I listed the drivers for the shift to analytics as a cloud service as:

1. It just makes sense
2. Simple, simple, simple
3. OLTP –> OLAP
4. Because Gartner said so!
5. “Date a fad, marry a trend.” (with acknowledgement to @kellblog of course)

Here’s the presentation.

On Demand BI from Darren Cunningham

Recently Amazon.com announced that Redshift, their data warehouse solution, is the company’s fastest growing AWS service. Over 1000 global customers are moving significant business intelligence initiatives to Amazon’s data warehouse in the cloud. This video does a pretty nice job of explaining how it works and why the value proposition is so compelling.

Related articles

• The Next Mega-Trend in Business Intelligence: So What Are Actionable Insights Anyway? (business2community.com)
• Business Intelligence Market to reach $20.81 Billion by 2018 at a 8.3% CAGR – New Report by MarketsandMarkets (prweb.com)
• Cloud Hosting Opens Possibilities for Business Intelligence (thewhir.com)

Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce Analytics and Compliance

I moderating a webinar last week that featured two great salesforce.com customers sharing their experiences with Informatica Cloud data replication. The webinar also featured a demonstration of cloud integration in action.

One of the customers shared their insights in this brief video:

Here is the recording of the cloud integration webinar:

And here are the slides:

Informatica Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce from Darren Cunningham

Related articles

• Aggregating Salesforce Data with a Cloud Integration Template (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)

Executive Megatrends Panel – Informatica World 2012

This industry panel was fairly typical in that it focused on social, mobile, cloud computing and Big Data – the megatrends of technology in 2012. What I thought was  unique about this discussion, is that it featured different, lively and somewhat contentious points of view. Instead of violent agreement, there was actually some great discussion and different perspectives on the technology industry were represented. The panel was moderated by R “Ray” Wang from Constellation Research and featured executives from EMC, Informatica, Google and Salesforce.com.

CIO Insight: Top IT Applications in 2012 and Beyond

CIO Insight published a great slideshow overview today on  application adoption trends over the next 12 months. I’d embed if if I could figure out out. Here’s a brief summary:

Top 5 apps to be integrated:

1. Business intelligence/analytics (39%)
2. Productivity/collaboration (36%)
3. Sales (34%)
4. Financial (28%)
5. Social Media (27%)

Top social media platform for marketing/customer support:

1. Facebook (32%)
2. Twitter (20%)
3. LinkedIn (20%)

Biggest roadblocks for fully harnessing data (percent respondents):

1. Insufficient integration (45%)
2. Data-quality maintenance (40%)
3. Network/system performance maintenance (35%)

Other results:

• 57% of respondents anticipate that data volume will increase 25% during the next 12 to 18 months.
• 56% of respondents feel that easily connecting applications and data will allow staff more time to work on other business initiatives.
• 33% of respondents say they’ll implement at least four SaaS/cloud applications during the next two years.
• 42% of respondents plan to incorporate cloud solutions to address integration needs.

Be sure to check out the complete presentation here.

Related articles

• Data is the key that ties it all together (zdnet.com)
• 1 in 10 CIOs want to be a ‘revolutionary’ (infoworld.com)
• Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce & the Social Enterprise Will Be Here All Week (Part 2) (zdnet.com)

#DF11 Video: Orchestrating Your Data: A Business Guide to Integration and Analytics

This Dreamforce 2011 presentation provides a good overview of both cloud-based analytics (GoodData) and data integration (Informatica Cloud). The session is from systems integrator Astadia, and features a nice balance of vendor overview, best practices, and some cool white boarding from an implementation expert – Aaron Mieswinkel.

Related articles

• 5 Requirements for a Big Data Integration Platform (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• Data Integration in the Cloud (via Business Analytics 3.0) (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Dreamforce Keynote (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)