At one time, business intelligence existed to gather data and dispense the information in graphs and reports, but time and demands are changing. With the ubiquity of smartphones in most enterprises, the trend in BI could be moving towards simplicity and accessibility.
It may be too early to tell if mobile applications will help define the future of business intelligence, but chances are they’ll figure heavily into how the technology will be delivered in the coming year and perhaps beyond, according to MicroStrategy Inc.’s vice president of products Mark LaRow who was in Toronto today to launch MicroStrategy 9’s latest release.
“I think it’s indisputable that it’s going to be a very major extension of BI,” LaRow told InfoExecutive. “ Just look at the number of apps that are in the Apple app store. There’s over 100,000 now … lots of apps that are far more information-intensive being built by companies who have a very large population of information consumers … they’re using the iPhone to do that … it’s going to become a very dominant mode of distribution yet.”
It’s still early days for BI mobile applications, but LaRow expects to see a significant uptake in the next 12 to 24 months – the amount of time it takes organizations to budget and kick start a major project like mobile information dissemination. “It’s not that the technology is not there,” he added. “It just hasn’t been secured into the major project funding in most companies. But I think it will very soon.”
Since unveiling MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 at the company’s annual MicroStrategy World event in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, LaRow said he’s fielded a dozen phone calls from large companies who already had mobile strategies in the works but wanted to implement it into a business intelligence technology.
