“The global Business intelligence market is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2022.”

Reuters

How much is your raw data worth without analysis in the 21st century? How productive are your insights dug out from your everyday processes? Where are data mining, Analytics, reports – that is business intelligence (BI) –  located in that paradigm?

Business intelligence (BI) in a traditional sense is changing. It goes from “what happened” to the more vital “what will happen next.” The BI and analytics domain has been stirred with some quite sizable acquisition deals recently. The loudest ones were Google’s plans to acquire Looker as an expansion to its Cloud platform and the cloud CRM powerhouse Salesforce voicing their intention to acquire Tableau intelligence software.

There were also arresting BI/data visualization software deals including the Sisense merger with Periscope Data, Logi Analytics acquiring Zoomdata, and the acquisition of ClearStory Data by Alteryx. It feels as if we have arrived at the point when big data and business analytics consolidation into a giant’s infrastructure has become prevalent. The IT industry world saw such a wave a couple of years ago when IBM acquired Cognos, SAP bought Business Objects, and Oracle merged with Hyperion.

There is a whole bunch of market-driven factors for such a tendency, starting from cloud offerings expansion on up to exclusive customer service. Let’s explore some main points.

What does it all mean for business and for customers? Google and Salesforce buyouts explained.

Lyubomyr Senyuk, CTO & Head of R&D at CoreValue comments:  

“Having warehousing, reporting and other integration tools on board for a while, Microsoft was dictating the rules of the Enterprise service’s game and in some meaning forced new game players to extend the offensive front. On the one hand, having data in the cloud makes it easier to access warehousing and reporting by means of the traditional approach. On the other hand, the desire of Salesforce and Google to cover more and more Enterprise functions finally wakened the role of ‘stand-alone’ integration and warehousing thus enabling new opportunities for powerful out-of-the-box reporting with integrated capabilities for handling multiple data sources.”

1. Data is in the cloud now

Enterprises produce dozens of datasets per hour. The more data is accumulated, the harder it gets to make better strategic use of it across the organization. It is primarily about being able to manage and analyze that data at scale and manage it in real time. Therefore, more and more big businesses are shifting their data to the cloud and integrating with cloud services. Over the past few years cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure use have been on the rise.

Salesforce heavily focuses on analytics. Its own Einstein Analytics Platform operates on the data generated within the Salesforce platform. To extend the business beyond customer relationship management and to add data from other sources, Salesforce purchased Tableau. Now, every department and every user can easily have it all: analytics and visualization platform.

Looker natively integrates with scalable cloud analytics platforms such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft Azure SQL DW. Tableau offers rapid shifts in product architecture and the go-to-market focus.

2. Data in the cloud needs to be analyzed

As Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, said, “In 2020 the world will generate 50-times the amount of data it did in 2011. Tapping into this massive data flow creates a huge opportunity for economic and human advancement.”

Advanced analytics is on the go. As more data moves to the cloud, more analytics, transformation, and data quality workloads are moving there, too. It is natural that Google and Salesforce engage Looker and Tableau to more effectively utilize the expanding amount of data on their platforms.

As the studies show in 2019, the most demanded from cloud BI are advanced visualization, support for ad-hoc queries, personalized dashboards, and data integration/data quality tools. Both Google and Salesforce needed quality visual analytics offerings to stay competitive.

The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will offer customers full-scale analytics and integrate insights into their daily workflows. Moreover, it delivers industry-specific analytics solutions for key verticals. With Looker, teams get applications for BI and embedded analytics products to collaborate on business decisions.

3. Anyone can analyze data

Modern data analysis tools, with the intuitive UI and low entry threshold, allow even more regular users to work with the data effectively. Looker and Tableau expand business intelligence to users outside of the IT department. The beauty of these tools are a next to perfect user experience combined with all-inclusive data insights. This self-service business intelligence software empowers regular users to implement and deploy analytics solutions without the help of tech professionals.

Tableau gives quick access to data and one can combine different data sources. Now after adding it to Salesforce, the teams can work on data-intensive projects with secure up-to-date customized views and rich integrations to produce a well-tailored solution.

Google and Salesforce embedded these capabilities into their platforms to empower a broader range of users.

Why Enterprises Choose Cloud BI?

Generally, companies are looking for a dynamic, easily manageable and powerful BI tool with customizations, acceptable costs and accessibility, as the determining factors. This raises the discussion between on-premise vs Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.

On-premise BI software is installed locally, on a company’s own computers and servers. Cloud BI software is hosted on the vendor’s servers and accessed through a web browser. The Cloud’s benefits are ease of use, deployment speed, accessibility and customization.

More analytic tools in the cloud offer improved communication and a better way in which companies can meet their customer’s needs. Adoption of SaaS is growing as its BI platforms don’t require the business to have the hardware, servers, or IT resources to get the software ready to work.

With the Google-Looker and Salesforce-Tableau deals, the cloud providers showed their commitment to the customers by amplifying its core platform’s services.

The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will offer customers a more complete analytics solution, from ingesting data to visualizing results, and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows. Looker has over 1,600 global customers including industry innovators like Amazon, Kickstarter, Spotify, Sony, Amazon, HubSpot, Yahoo, and IBM.

With Tableau, Salesforce enables companies around the world to tap into data across their entire business and surface deeper insights to make smarter decisions, to drive intelligent connected customer experiences and to accelerate innovation. Tableau uses self-service analytics to help people with data within any skill level work. Among the companies that use Tableau’s services are Charles Schwab, Verizon and Netflix.

Story Behind Your Data: How Customers Win with Tableau

The CoreValue data science team has rich experience in projects with complex data needs. That is why we use a lot of different data visualization tools to translate data into real-life actions (Microsoft Power BI, Exago, Birst, Sisense, SAP Crystal Reports, Looker, QlikView, and TIBCO Jaspersoft).

In a couple of projects we opted specifically for the Tableau software as an effective data visualization tool and as a leader in building interactive reports. Tableau includes in-memory and in-database analytics architecture, rich integrations with numerous databases, scalability, smooth exploration of huge datasets, comfortable prototyping capabilities, effortless interactive docs sharing with drag-n-drop functionality, and its simplicity to learn which makes it a worthy choice for business needs.

For our clients, it was important to have seamless mapping and clean data visualization for ad hoc data analysis. They needed a BI and reporting solution to make faster business decisions, while monitoring growth and sharing pertinent information with appropriate management groups and partners.

We implemented the Tableau software into the final solutions. And these projects helped our clients win in such ways:

• All-in-one-place reporting environment
• Advanced information filtering
• Row-level security functionalities
• Fresh data visualizations in daily reports
• Easily generated data analysis
• Ability to combine different types of data
• Ability to connect different data sources
• Quicker data access
• Better analytics of all the data from different teams
• Customization of data
• Improved UX

The solutions help to gain actionable insights and understand business performance based on statistical methods and machine learning techniques.

Final Note

Enterprises see even more importance in business intelligence. Dresner Advisory Services’ research shows that 48% of organizations recognize cloud BI as critical to their operations in 2019.

CoreValue R&D unit Coresearch and its data science team can help your company harness the power of big data analytics. Together you will reach your strategic goals with machine learning tools and techniques, and innovate with expert business intelligence (BI) services, like performance and trends analysis, customer research, forecasting, strategy optimization, budget and financial planning, reporting and much more. You can see how your data performs in various configurations: SQL Server, MySQL, PostgresSQL, AWS Redshift, Azure DWH, and many more

The post Big cloud vendors looking to own data assets appeared first on CoreValue.