Every year around Christmas dozens of research houses & tech bloggers make Business Intelligence, Analytics & Data Science predictions for the following year. Over the last couple weeks I have been reading & mulling over these predictions with interest. In this post I will try and summarize these predictions, but also pull in my own research to distill out trends that I feel will shape 2011.
Top level predictions & themes
1) Continued expansion of the “Digital Universe”.
2) More business & personal data will migrate to the cloud.
3) Increased interest in techniques to store, analyze & visualize complex data.
4) Mobility. Analysis of data generated from mobile devices will become more strategically important. Business users will also want to access analytics and reports on the move.
In a way, I am almost disappointed to say none of the themes are new. Instead they represent the strengthening of trends started in previous years. Here is a bit more detail of my view on each.
1) The “Digital Universe” will continue to expand in size and complexity.
Case in point- Facebook has 600 million active users, 50% log on daily, the average user has 130 friends & users spend 700 billion minutes per month on the site. One of guys in my office downloaded his Facebook history last week, it was 500 megabytes in size-compressed! This is a lot of data!
Back in 2009, IDC predicted that the digital universe will grow from 0.9 to 35 Zettabytes by 2020. Through 2011 the expansion of the digital universe will only accelerate with the increase in smart phone & tablets penetration, and the greater use of location bases services (LBS), social media, traditional search, e-commerce. Turning this ocean data into insight & ultimately revenue will provide the impetus to capture and analyze much of it.
The growing value of data means “big data” & new data storage paradigms will become more crucial, albeit to the relatively small number of companies (Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Google etc.) that capture, store, and utilize these massive amounts of data. Those with knowledge of “big data” tools such as Hadoop will be in demand by these big name companies.
With this increase in data volume will be an increase in the diversity of data silos. Although businesses are migrating to the cloud, most are still operating a mixed environment that still also rely on traditional on-premise data storage. Businesses will need to integrate these data sources in order to provide the big picture of the environment they are trying to navigate. For companies growing through mergers and acquisitions, integration of data sources (such as customer databases) is often crucial in ultimately determining the success of this type of growth strategy. The huge investments that companies make to develop a single view of their customer base highlight this. As an example, one of my previously employers has just announced its spending $200 million for a single data integration project.
No doubt the growing size and complexity of the data universe will provide more opportunities skilled individuals & the new generation data integration companies (such as Snaplogic).
2) Techniques to store analyze and visualize complex data sets will evolve rapidly.
Large complex dataset require novel analytical techniques. Uptake of “In-memory storage & analysis” will continue to grow. At the lower end of the scale this means the Vertipaq based Powerpivot add-in for Excel, while at the upper end of the market it includes large scale tools such as Oracles Times Ten.
Techniques to summarize and communicate insight about complex data sets such as Infographics will become more main stream. Multi-dimensional & interactive charts such as motion charts will also continue to evolve. The interest in both infographics and tools like motions charts is reflected in the 3 million + views that the trailer for “Hans Rosling’s documentary “The Joy of Stats” received over just 1 month on YouTube (see video below). If analysts aren’t using these latest analytical tools, they will increasingly drown in the data.
3) Data will continue to migrate to the cloud.
The cloud featured at the top of Gartner’s 10 strategic technologies for 2011. Growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing models will go hand in hand with the cloud. These online applications will make it easier to accommodate an increasingly mobile workforce.
4) Mobility.
Tablets & smart phone usage will increase. Cheaper android devices will lower the price point of entry to mobile devices & this will expand the user base. The number of mobile devices has already surpassed the number of computers. Twenty-five billion apps will be downloaded by 2015. All these devices and apps will all generate data, and much of it will need to be analyzed.
Market places for, and the trading of data will increase as more ways to monetize data appear. Location based services such as Foursquare will grow in value as data from the mobile devices becomes more important for serving up geo- specific advertising.
Finally, users will also want to access to Business Intelligence on the move. Many of the traditional vendors (IBM, SAP etc.) are providing mobile BI solutions, but many new specialist mobile BI vendors such as Transpara, DSPanel, Roambi are springing up at an ever increasing rate.
Summary
So what do these trends & predictions mean for my direction this year? Well, nothing too radical really. I am going to still focus on the basics of BI. The rationale is that data will still need to be cleansed, transformed, and integrated. The key difference is data volumes will be larger, data will be more diverse, it will be spread between more silos, and insight will be consumed on the move.
So I am sure this year will be even more interesting and disruptive than the last but people will still need reports and analytics. It looks like 2011 will be another good year to be in Business Intelligence, Analytics & the Data Sciences.
