At the end of every year, predictions are made and trends are identified setting the tone for the upcoming year.   Within business intelligence applications there are always changes because of the advancements in technology – i.e. mobile, social media, processing speed, storage, etc. All of these items will continue to affect BI moving forward.   Aside from the increase in performance, because of the increasing ease of development, price points will also become more diversified as vendors with offerings with lower price points continue to make inroads into the market and expand their offerings. For the mid-market this will be very beneficial…

Moving forward, WiseAnalytics will continue to cover the mid-market – looking at what companies are doing, what solutions are available, and particularly the value associated with BI for mid-market organizations. In addition, a continued emphasis will be placed on dashboards and data visualization in terms of how they are being used and vertical applications and data visualization design.

Overall, next year promises to be very interesting for those looking at the dashboard market or who are focused on BI for small and mid-sized businesses.

One of the fastest growing types of BI adoption is through Software as a Service solutions.   Organizations are looking at SaaS and comparing potential solutions to other in-house options. This means that more competition exists for solution providers as in the past companies looked at one type of solution over the other.   Now, the market place is saturated with many types of solutions and business applications without the clarity of which products are directly in competition or complementary to one another.   In addition to companies being confused over the types of solutions best suited to meet their business needs, solution providers are looking at SaaS providers and the use of on demand solutions in general as a new competitive factor within the overall BI market landscape.

Approaches to identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS include online surveys posted by vendors not within the SaaS space, such as the Klipfolio SaaS survey aimed at identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS.   It will be interesting to see in the next year or so whether SaaS adoption and services offered will increase within the BI space.