With the last quarter of this year already in fast motion, the race to the finish line of 2013 is on! Perhaps it is already a good moment to look at whether some of the IT Trends 2013 predicted by Gartner, PwC and many others, have actually surfaced for our customers and what this may mean for your organization.

Advanced data visualization

Whether with our customers in Europe or in our practice in the Middle East, the number one topic this year has been around flexible, ad-hoc data visualization. As companies further promote self-service analytics to its workforce, the mash-up and advanced visualization of desktop data with a variety of corporate data sources in an easy-to-use fashion is becoming a hot topic. No longer are smaller and more agile “Business Discovery” solutions providers challenging the big players like Oracle, SAP and IBM only on a departmental level. IT organizations are more and more considering these solutions, alongside their existing enterprise-wide BI capability. As a result, organizations will need to decide whether to maintain, train and support multiple applications or choose to work with their current enterprise BI vendor to further enhance their existing business discovery solutions. A tough choice to make! Perhaps we will see another wave of BI vendor consolidation in 2014?

Mobile BI & BYOD

Not a week goes by without at least one demo or proposal going to a customer in which the ability to interact with corporate data on a mobile device, preferably any of the main mobile OS (Android, iOS) on a personal or company device is requested. Organizations will need to ensure they look at mobile device management solutions to address this challenge head on as employees drive the consumerisation at the workplace.

Cloud BI

Customers in Europe and increasingly also in the Middle East are generally looking for more flexible licensing and hosting solutions for BI. In addition, more and more we are being at asked to provide BI capabilities in an OPEX model. Service providers will therefore need to adapt to provide more flexibility to its clients. Our BI hosting option in the cloud has seen an excellent uptake as a result! Overall, we see the trend of private cloud for BI to further extend well into 2014!

Shortage of talent

No, I won’t focus on big data in this article. But one thing is clear: data volumes, velocity, variety, etc. coupled with the increasing ubiquity of BI solutions in organizations is further highlighting a very related trend. We are seeing a lack of knowledgeable resources that can extract and filter out meaningful conclusions from vast amounts of data.

Is your company following the path we have been witnessing in our customers? What trends have you seen stand out in your industry?

Marc Haberland is the Managing Director of Clariba. He looks back on 14 years of Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) experience across many industries throughout Europe, the Middle East and North America. Marc currently leads his team of BI experts in Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Spain to deliver projects across the Gulf, KSA, in Europe and North America. Prior to working in the BI space Marc held various management positions in sales, marketing and product management with Picis and Hitachi Europe. Marc received his Masters in Technical Marketing and his Bachelor in Electronics Engineering from Polytechnical University in Munich, Germany. 

Marc can be contacted at marc.haberland@clariba.com