Recently I spoke with Rob Reid and Ken Rudin of LucidEra to learn more about their Pipeline Healthchecks that help Salesforce.com customers analyze their sales pipelines, marketing, etc. The overall goal is to identify how to increase sales and revenue, and decrease expenditures by looking at what efforts create the most value.  For example, sales forces may be putting 80% of their effort for 30% of overall profits. By assessing current allocations and breaking down information, organizations are able to interpret all of their sales based information to identify the best places to focus their efforts.  

Aside from seeing intrinsic value in using analytics to take sales data and show organizations how they can use their current processes and existing information to increase profits and allocate time more efficiently, LucidEra is helping organizations be proactive in their approach to sales analytics.  All the while, positioning themselves as a value added service in addition to their overall SaaS-based solutions. With embedded analytics becoming more mainstream, it stands to reason that vendors, such as LucidEra, have to add services and work closer with customers to increase the associated value of their products.  After all, because of the rate of change of technology, features and functionality only provide a portion of what customers see as creating value in regards to the products and services they use to analyze their overall performance.

 

Below is a link to a copy of the summary report of the BI for Mid-Market survey. It provides an overview of survey respondents and their use of BI, attitudes, and awareness. 

Download midmarket_bi.pdf

Over the past year, the BI market has seen many changes - in addition to consolidations, there has been a plethora of new entrants to the market, niche vendors targeting one area or another within the full BI stack, the acceptance of open source in the mainstream market, and embedded BI becoming more relevant. Also, there has been a large focus on operational BI to move BI to the next level and enable its applications to become one with the organization.  

With these changes, one would think that the way organizations use BI would shift dramatically.  But the fact remains that many organizations use spreadsheets, spreadmarts, or traditional forms of BI for analysis but may be years away from pushing BI beyond a batch and report approach. In addition, although all of these new trends have emerged, how many will remain or take shape becomes more interesting to watch.  For instance, whatever focus vendors and thought leaders may have, the only way for trends to move beyond talk towards actual adoption is to have a large number of organizations implement operational BI, embedded analytics, and the like. 
Looking at master data management (MDM) as an example, although the market has moved from CDI and PIM solutions towards organization wide MDM, actual implementation of MDM across the organizations is few and far between, with many years before it becomes a reality in more than a few companies. The same can be said within BI, however, which trends and industry focuses actually become adopted and widely used in the next few years can only be surmised.