Mobility, social media and the consumerization of IT have great influenced what business models look like nowadays. Furthermore, the massive flow of data from these avenues has elevated the business intelligence (BI) into a new level. As the future beams bright for this industry, especially after the recent Super Bowl showing, recent trends have been shaping around BI. One of the more interesting developments is the introduction of BI’s Magic Quadrant, as illustrated in a recent Gartner report.

The Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was segmented into multiple parts based on two defining elements: the ability to execute and completeness of vision. The assemblage was based on the evaluation of each’s strengths, cautions and other parameters.

First Quadrant. So-called challengers, this group has a relatively strong ability to execute plans but is lacking a bit of vision and business direction. Tableau and Tibco Software, or Spotfire occupy this space.

Second Quadrant. This segment is the cream of the crop. The companies that belong to the 2^nd quadrant have solid execution and implementation aptitude with a clear vision of where they are heading.  Biggies include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

Third Quadrant. While this area is empty, it represents the visionaries that require more power in executing business plans.

Fourth Quadrant. This is perhaps the most crowded group of all, with the likes of Alteryx, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Panorama Software and Targit tagged as niche players. They have a somewhat weak ability to execute, with visions that need to be strengthened. This quadrant is obviously the one that has the largest avenue for improvement.

Tableau Software

What started as a multidimensional relational databases’ browser, Tableau Software has shuttled its way as a prominent rapid-fire BI tool that drives ROI within a short span of time. At the onset of the year, the organization vowed to chase growth aggressively in 2012, and will add 300 new employees to their present roster of talent.

Tableau Software’s CEO and Co-founder, Christian Chabot revealed details on how they are forming a larger team to support growing business demands:

“We’re on a growth trajectory, and we need great people to help us make the most of our opportunity. We have assembled a passionate and driven team of people who genuinely embrace our mission to help people see and understand data. We’re looking to hire more developers, salespeople, marketing and operations people who share our passion.”

Tableau also sees expansion opportunities beyond the United States, as they invade the European Union with the opening of European Support Center in London.  They also teamed-up with Cloudera to empower BI with Apache Hadoop. Its eccentric BI technology has placed them in the “challenger” category in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, as previously mentioned. In this sector Tableau is joined Spotfire while the “leaders” quadrant featured the likes of Information Builders and Aprimo.

Jaspersoft

An open source reporting library, Jaspersoft’s success story proves that there is money and stability in BI platforms. Various improvements and updates have taken place within this cost-effective reporting tool, including its partnership with Red Hat that gave birth to BI PaaS and embedded BI.  The former was built to adapt to PaaS-based environments and make management easier for developers, while the latter targets seamless integration of user experience to reporting and analysis.

Red Hat has made JasperReports server as the core of the new visualization platform called Red Hat Enterprise Visualization 3.0 or RHEV. Cloud giant VMWare, has also announced JasperReports server addition to its current Cloud Foundry package.

Perhaps the unprecedented fame of mobility transcends even to business intelligence. Especially for employees and executives on the go, a handy mobile app for smartphones and tablets are a big help. The expansion of BI into mobile platform paves the way for operational efficiencies and simplification of business processes, anytime, anywhere. Jaspersoft realizes the importance of flexibility in enterprises. Together with the element of affordability, the company launched Jaspersoft mobile BI to enable mobile device provide the same user experience just like in the office.

Just this week, Jaspersoft appointed a new exec, as Clive Harrison assumed the SVP of Worldwide Field Operations. He will be overseeing global sales channels and customer support.

BI in Industries

While the IT market and advertising firms enjoy a great deal of benefits from new BI trends, other industries are joining the bandwagon. Industry Intelligence Inc. now offers a comprehensive intel solution on the food and beverage industry by analyzing trends and data from agribusiness to the end-user. For professionals to better grasp the market (who buys what vehicles and what vehicles are selling), Experian Automotive unveiled Velocity (SM) at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA)  convention a week ago. This tool combines the power of broad automotive data with sophisticated analytics solution.

The rise of big data into the spotlight has carried with it business intelligence as a tool to boost strategic planning and market presence for the enterprise world. As BI progresses to the online sphere, web analytics reaches the mainstream, as evident by the growing number of apps created to analyze web traffic, consumer engagement, views, likes and shares in social media and many more.