- Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the preferred cloud platform by 73% of companies deploying Cloud BI apps.
- 40% plan to increase spending on private cloud and 34% are increasing budgets for public cloud platforms.
- 33% of enterprises are relying on public cloud-based BI apps today, increasing from 13% in 2012.
- 31% of respondents currently use Cloud Business Intelligence (BI), a 6% increase over 2016.
- Google Analytics and Salesforce are the two most preferred third-party connectors for Cloud BI.
Dresner Advisory Services published their 6th annual report on Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) titled 2017 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study (101 pp., PDF, client access reqd). This report provides insights into deployment trends & attitudes toward cloud business intelligence (BI) defined as the technologies, tools, and solutions that employ one or more cloud deployment models. “We began to analyze this market dynamic back in 2012 when adoption was nascent, and since that time we have seen deployments of public cloud BI applications continue to grow steadily,” said Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services. “Organizations are citing substantial benefits over traditional on-premises implementations. While challenges remain and improvements can certainly be made, we believe that cloud business intelligence, particularly public cloud offerings, will continue to move into the mainstream.” Please see page 10 of the study for an overview of the methodology.
Key takeaways of the study include the following:
- Executive Management, Marketing, and Sales, and Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) value Cloud BI apps and the insights they provide the most. Nearly 50% of executive management teams see Cloud BI as critical and very important to their information needs. Approximately 45% of BICCs see Cloud BI as being critical and very important. Research and Development (R&D) sees the least value in Cloud analytics and BI, followed by IT.
- Financial Services, Education (Higher Ed) and Business Services are the three industries who place the greatest importance on Cloud BI today. Additional industries that have a relatively high level of interest in Cloud BI include retail & wholesale and telecommunications. Manufacturing’s many challenges are creating opportunities for advanced predictive analytics.
- 33% of enterprises are relying on public cloud-based BI apps today, increasing from 13% in 2012. The survey found that there is still resistance to public cloud-based platforms corporate wide. The urgency Marketing and Sales, Executive Management and Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) have for getting results are accelerating adoption through organizational barriers, however.
- 73% named Amazon Web Services as their first choice for a Cloud BI provider.27% of respondents’ first choice is Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, with IBM SoftLayer (BlueMix) mentioned as a second choice by approximately 15% of the interviewees.
- Google Analytics and Salesforce dominate third-party connector choice by organizations today. Google Analytics is most often selected by Marketing and Sales, followed by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Salesforce integration is most requested this year by Finance as more companies are relying on advanced pricing strategies to upsell and cross-sell existing customers while improving lifetime customer value.
- North America is the global leader in adopting public cloud platforms for Cloud BI, with 60% of organizations either using or plan to use public cloud this year.Asia-Pacific is second in its adoption and intends to rely on public cloud platforms for Cloud BI. Asia-Pacific will also lead the world this year in private cloud adoption support for Cloud BI initiatives.
- 44% of small companies with up to 100 employees are most likely to use cloud BI today. 32% of very large organizations (greater than 5K employees) are the second most likely to have cloud BI implemented. And 24% of large organizations (1K – 5K employees) are likely to adopt Cloud BI apps today. The following graphic compares the plans to use Cloud BI by organization size.
- The most in-demand Cloud BI requirements in Business Services are advanced visualization, ad hoc queries and data integration/data quality tools/ETL.Financial Services’ strongest interest is in dashboards, end user self-service options and the ability to write to transactional applications. The following graphic prioritizes feature requirements by industry.
- Big Data, ability to write transactional applications and complex event processing (CEP) are the top three most significant changes in Cloud BI priorities between 2016 and 2017. Data discovery, in-memory support, and pre-packaged vertical/functional analytics apps have become deprioritized over the last year. Then following graphic is insightful in that it shows the shift in Cloud BI feature priorities between 2016 and 2017.
- Reporting, dashboards, end-user “self-service”, advanced visualization and data warehousing are the top five technologies that are strategic to BI today. Cloud computing is considered by respondents to be more critical than big data, social media analysis and the Internet of Things (IoT). A ranking of the 33 categories included in the study is shown below.
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