Business Intelligence, Processes Converge to Drive Business Decision-Making: Report

Recent advancements in software capabilities, technologies and deployments are shifting business intelligence paradigms and are changing the way companies do business, according to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by geographic BI software developer Alteryx. Industries such as retail, real estate, banking and telecommunications are moving quickly toward single-vendor BI solutions and prepackaged content, converging business processes toward a new generation of best-practice decision-making, the report indicated.

The Forrester study from October 2010, "Integrated and Flexible Business Intelligence Solutions Are Vital for Better Business Decisions," identifies and outlines the state of the art in BI best practices, and how convergence of end-to-end solutions and business processes is boosting enterprise performance and ROI. Flexible use scenarios are cited in various examples of how next-generation deployments are driving decisions in the cloud for convenience, and on-premises for security priorities.

The findings support the Dec. 23, 2010, "BI Maturity in the Enterprise: 2010 Update" by Forrester Research's Boris Evelson that identified strong trends in agile BI with less centralization and more pervasive use across wide-ranging vertical markets and industry categories. Talent and skills are in demand, as more enterprises are combining BI and spatial analytics into their traditional business processes.

"Although BI is one of the original software application disciplines, spatial analytics, prepackaged content and single-vendor solutions are helping to shift paradigms across multiple vertical markets in the BI software space," said Alteryx CEO Dean Stoecker. "More than a map in the cloud, spatial requires integrated, end-to-end solutions and an architectural platform that can cross the chasms between the desktop and the cloud. The code base of the future is already transcending geospatial processing and moving toward solving multi-disciplined business problems, and changing the very nature of BI and its inter-relationship with the science of business process."

The company's latest offering, Alteryx 2011, is an integrated BI platform delivering consumer profiling and behavior segmentation tools, advanced processing of spatial and non-spatial data, and a range of BI functionality, including Spatial Processing, Extract, Transform and Load (ETL), Address Hygiene and Data Quality, BI Analytics, Reporting and Visualization and Customer Data Integration (CDI).