A Look At What's In Store For Business Intelligence In 2016
By Jonathan Buckley, Senior VP of Marketing, at Qubole
The year 2015 has been big for technology and its methods for helping businesses grow, evolve, and discover new levels of success. And as 2016 begins, it’s clear that business intelligence is going to benefit more than ever before. This is about more than bring your own device (BYOD) or the Internet of Things (IoT); business intelligence is what allows businesses to assess their audiences, their competition, and, most notably, themselves. There are high hopes that the advances 2015 brought us are only going to get bigger for business intelligence, with new and unexpected discoveries bursting onto the scene.
What will a few of these interesting treats be?
- Cloud Data And Analytics. It’s been a big year for the cloud in general, with more businesses than ever doing more than making the switch — many have come to rely on the cloud’s services entirely. Having inspired a great deal of loyalty, 2016 holds great promise for more companies shifting their dependency to the cloud’s flexibility in Big Data service and analytics, as well as its ability to scale and accommodate a range of businesses’ size and requirements. Better yet, with demand encouraging innovation, it’s safe to reason the cloud will only be improving the features it’s beloved for by businesses in order to get a greater foothold in Big Data.
- Internet Of Things Data. The IoT shows signs of becoming even more popular this year, and when one considers the reach that several devices connected to every portion of a consumer’s life offers, it becomes quickly clear that the Internet of Things is a cash cow of data. By gathering information on consumer habits, tastes, and recent trends arriving on the market, businesses can benefit from a whole new scale and blend of information. With this in mind, 2016 is going to be a highly successful year for business intelligence, especially with the IoT contributing to the pool.
- Visual Data Analytics. With Big Data offering businesses so much information in 2015, we are entering 2016 with more information than we possibly know what to do with. With that in mind, it’s clear that visual data analytics will be one of the favored tools for business intelligence in the coming year, with its ability to sift through the massive pool of trends, tastes, and habits not only fast, but with much more efficiency. Visual data analytics allows professionals to find patterns in data by placing them in a new form, making it easier to spot matching structures that were previously thought to be unrelated. Considering this new advantage, businesses can do far more than just keep ahead of the competition — they can use Big Data to its full potential.
- Intelligence-As-A-Service. More and more businesses are searching for ways to analyze data and discover relevant structures without the great expenses of IT support. The solution to this lies with self-service business intelligence, which often relies on visual data analysis to see this goal met. It keeps to the basic requirements of analyzing data by extracting data, organizing it, storing it with flash storage, and then making it accessible for processing at a remote location, but there is still a degree of IT influence necessary. In 2016, businesses may see their dreams realized with Intelligence-as-a-Service, which would allow the analyzing process to be entirely handled by a self-managing software, cutting out the middle man and making it possible for businesses both large and small to outsource their analytics without the additional cost.
- Predictive Analytics. As Big Data continues to grow and offer more and more data to be sorted, it becomes clear that businesses are going to drown in the wealth of information. It quickly becomes a struggle to not be held back as other businesses move forward. The solution for keeping businesses’ heads above water is predictive analytics, which has been in use for some time; but in 2016, this method for cutting corners will become more valuable. By assessing previous data that has been deemed valuable, predictive analytics can live up to its name and forecast what future trends, tastes, and relevant data will be, allowing businesses to cut through the fluff and get to what really matters faster than before.
The year 2016 will have many big changes and innovations for businesses, but you can be sure of one thing: With the valuable tools 2015 has offered for business intelligence, these techniques and methods are only going to improve and get stronger in the coming year.