It is becoming more apparent than ever that the leading BI companies of four years ago (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) having been taken over by bigger software application companies (SAP, IBM and Oracle) are losing their leadership position in BI innovation as most of their BI product development effort is focused inwardly to better integrate with their respective owners applications to take advantage of easier sales within their own customer base. They have almost become “legacy BI” solutions along with Microsoft who is quickly falling into the same category. As many industry analysts predicted at the time of these acquisitions, this has made room for new startup companies to fill the void left behind. So during these past few years , we have seen the meteoric rise of Apple with its mobile solutions, Saleforce with its phenomenal cloud based CRM application and Qliktech with its high speed, fast deployment BI solutions.

The BI landscape continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace and I am sure we will be looking at many new names, unheard of today, in a year’s time. In the meantime, here are my top 5 BI predictions for 2012 :

Prediction 1:  Mobile Business Intelligence will start to dominate over conventional business intelligence as companies will demand mobility as a compulsory feature. Mobile workforces will start to replace laptops with iPads (which will be the tablet of choice for businesses in 2012) as more useful and compelling BI solutions are developed for mobile devices. Companies like Mellmo, with Roambi (www.roambi.com), are already well positioned to take advantage of this trend but other strong competitors will emerge in the coming year as more BI dashboard solutions go mobile.

Prediction 2: Cloud based BI applications will propagate like wildfire and the race is on as to who, if anyone, will dominate this space. The question is do any of the BI vendors have the execution capability and the vision to do what Microsoft did to dominate the PC software business or Amazon did to dominate the on-line retail space – namely drop the price so low (or even free) to gain market share at the cost of profit? If not, watch out for iCloud or Google making a play for this huge BI opportunity.

Prediction 3: BI dashboards will continue to thrive but there will be more trend towards Operational BI rather than Strategic BI in 2012. As the capabilities for alerting, write back, connectivity to all types of applications (cloud, internet, on premise, mobile and machine interface) continue to expand, the possibilities and demand for operational BI with dashboard interfaces will too.

Prediction 4: “Big Data” wars will drive more demand for BI. With IBM leading the pack and SAP and Oracle not far behind, I predict a battle on an Exabyte scale as they and others compete as to who can analyze the most data in the fastest time and push it into meaningful BI solutions. The good news for businesses is that this will drive the price of BI tools down (as will the competition from Cloud and Mobile BI solutions).

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be super-hot in 2012. The demand to perform BI against unstructured data sources from the web and use BI tools to analyze and visualize will go beyond conventional marketing applications and become an invaluable asset in all areas of business. (Of course, this was the prediction I did not score myself well on in 2011 so I want to go further out on the limb with it this year!).

So let’s see what happens. I am certainly pumped up and excited to see how BI will continue to evolve this year. It is a safe prediction to say that it will evolve for sure but it is usually the unpredictable direction that keeps us (especially me) on our toes. Enjoy the ride.

Prediction 1: Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as the BI User Interface of choice. They will expand beyond their traditional tactical and strategic usage and be seen more in operational BI applications as backend performance with in memory analytics and caching continues to improve. Tools like Xcelsius will increase their presence due to both their visual appeal and ease of use.

Well Visual Dashboards did remain dominant and they certainly did expand into operational BI areas. We saw non-traditional BI functions like “write back” become more used. Xcelsius continued to grow in popularity and usage. I think I scored a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 2: Data Governance will be a priority as both large and mid-size companies are compelled to accurately consolidate and clean up their data for more relevant and precise business intelligence. Data quality, integration and master data management solutions will become mandatory in many organizations.

Data Governance was a priority with many large companies in 2011 but not so much with mid-size organizations as they tried to navigate a very unpredictable and bumpy economy. Data quality remained important but was still often pushed down the priority list in favor of meeting deliverable deadlines. I think I can only give myself a 2 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 3: The race for optimal mobile business intelligence solutions will get into full swing. With a plethora of new tablet devices and new BI mobile software products, I anticipate a year of experimentation and we will need to wait another year before the real market leaders are determined. Watch out for Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/) because they are definitely heading in the right direction.

Mobile BI was a big topic in 2011 and a lot of new solutions appeared, both streaming and off-line based applications. Many companies did explore and experiment and some purchased and deployed. We saw many new tablet devices appear and almost as quickly disappear. Apple’s iPad remains the business tablet device of choice while Androids are becoming the most popular mobile smart phones. Roambi increased its presence globally and just released more amazing new views (Layers and Squares) and has become the BI mobile solution to beat. I score myself a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 4: Relational database Data Marts and Warehouses will continue to be the BI repository of choice in 2011. OLAP cubes will remain a niche market and the new in memory databases are just too immature and too expensive to have a serious impact this year. There will probably be lots of hype but until this new technology is affordable to the masses, it will have minimal effect. Data Mart projects will continue to thrive in the small to medium enterprise space.

Data Marts and Warehouses still remain the BI repository of choice although many companies are looking at a quicker method to deploy their ever-increasing demand for BI analytics. SAP spent a boat load of money, resources and hype promoting their new HANA in-memory analytics solution but there are very few running in live production. As the technology evolves and becomes more commodity that may change. I score 5 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be hot and in demand. The need to perform BI against the predominantly unstructured data sources of the web has never been greater as more business and institutions both grow their web presence and web driven marketing. BI tools and solutions that can quickly analyze this data both quantitatively and qualitatively will see fast growth and adoption in 2011.

Using BI against Web and social media content has grown in 2011 but it has not been as hot as I was predicting. I have read several articles this year about success stories in this area but I have actually encountered very few first hand. The tools to analyze the unstructured content are good but are still relatively expensive and require a lot of services (more expensive). Maybe that will change in the next year or so. I can only score myself a 1 out of 5 for this one.

So my final grade is a 72% which according to my daughter in High School is only a “C”. Well I will have to do better than that so stand by for my 2012 BI predictions coming in the next few weeks.

Citing examples from companies like Zappos, Dr. McGonigal quite convincingly explained how games create positive emotions like joy, relief, love surprise, pride, curiosity, awe, contentment, creativity and excitement. Judging by my own teenage son’s reaction after playing World of Warcraft or Call for Duty, I might add a couple more emotions to that list.

A recent study estimated that people around the world spend a total of 3 billion hours a week playing online games alone which certainly would indicate that we like playing games. At the same time, the cost for not being positive in the workplace has been estimated to cost businesses around $300 billion a year. McGonigal explained that the opposite of play is not work but depression and that games can help to create “super empowered, hopeful individuals” and make work more fun than fun!

We then played a game of “massively multiple player Thumb Wrestling” to show how playing games gets our oxytocin flowing and makes us feel good and I must admit that I left the session pretty upbeat but with some sore thumbs!

The next day it rained – a rare occurrence for Las Vegas and I got pretty wet running to the Starbucks to get my wakeup fix. The detour made me late for the first keynote so I ran across the bridge from the Starbucks to the Venetian which was not very smart on that slippery surface. About half way across, I saw my feet appearing at the same height as my chest and my butt was the next part of my body to strike the ground. I had but one thought – “Save the Café Mocha”!  It was in my right hand which I held high and upright and despite some nasty bruises and soaking wet pants, the Mocha was saved.

I entered the keynote dripping wet and sore but triumphant (Mocha in hand) as I watched a video of Hasso Plattner declaring once again how SAP has reinvented itself in terms of technology through HANA. The theme was continued with several case studies and video testimonies, including showing how HANA can analyze a boat load of data faster than someone can bake a cake. It was all very similar to Sapphire four months earlier. Interestingly, a quick show of hands in the audience of over 4,000 indicated that less than 2% of attendees were considering HANA in the next 12 months.

There was some mention of Sybase and Sybase IQ with an impressive established install base of customers.

Then there were breakout sessions galore although, like Sapphire, not that many on BusinessObjects.

One session that I did find very interesting was entitled “Pervasive Location Analytics” which was an intriguing look at the growing significance of the location dimension in data and how Google, in particular, have had a big influence on this. There was a fascinating case study shown where the Guardian Newspaper in the UK  (www.Guardian.co.uk) used location analytics to determine if poverty was a factor in the recent riots in the UK. By layering the locations where the riots occurred and arrests were made with the location of the addresses of those arrested with a heat map of the average income level of those areas, they were able to see a correlation.

The presenter mentioned that SAP has recently signed a 3-year deal with Google to use Google Maps and other Google location API’s with its applications and they had also signed a partnership agreement with Centigon Solutions (www.CentigonSolutions.com) to use and resell their Google Maps plug-in for Xcelsius dashboards.

Like Sapphire, TechEd is just too big with too much going for me. It is hit or miss on the sessions (some useful, some not). I am not sure if I will go next year but, if I do, I will definitely avoid playing thumb wars and running on wet slippery bridges.

If you are interested in the idea of gamification, here’s a TED talk from Feb 2010 by Jane McGonigal on how Gaming Can Make a Better World.

As I walked around the showcase showing Xcelsius dashboards running on an iPad, people stopped with looks of disbelief mixed with wonder.

“How are you doing that?”

“Xcelsius doesn’t run on an iPad or an iPhone”

Well, I am happy to report that with MyBI Mobile, not only does Xcelsius run on an iPad and an iPhone, but also on an Android. And it not only runs but it sings too! It has a fabulous simple menu system to serve up different content on the device and that content can also be Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence in addition to Xcelsius. With Web Intelligence you can also create new reports from the mobile device – that’s cool! When viewing and interacting with the content, you can perform a “pinch and zoom” action on any part of the screen to automatically enlarge that area of the dashboard or report.

While many companies have invested in building both dazzling and effective Xcelsius dashboard business intelligence solutions, they have often been challenged when trying to find ways to move these to mobile devices. The operating system for the IPhone and IPad (iOS) does not support Flash and SWF outputs natively but with MyBI mobile the barriers have been lifted. You can now take your key Xcelsius dashboards and just serve them up on iPads, iPhones and Androids without changing them and interact with all the features just the same as on the PC.

I cannot express enough how incredible this is and what it means to the millions of Xcelsius users around the world who want to take their dashboards mobile  - you are free of your shackles and you can now deliver Xcelsius to the most popular mobile smart devices out there.

I recently heard there are an estimated 200 million iOS devices in use today and now all those users can enjoy the full functionality of the amazing data visualization of Xcelsius through MyBI Mobile.

If the excitement at IBIS is anything to go by, you will certainly be hearing and seeing a lot more of this solution in the coming months so stay tuned.