5 Market Trends in Business Analytics

In today's business environment, organizations are increasingly demanding advanced analytics that allow them to use large volumes and diverse types of data to discover patterns and anomalies and predict outcomes.

Here are five market trends that we have noticed in business analytics:

1. Visual Interfaces Are Making Advanced Analytics More Accessible to Business Users:
   Data scientists are few and far between on the ground, and small and mid-sized enterprises in particular are struggling to create experienced analytics teams due to a lack of budget. At the same time, analytics is working its way into decision-making at all levels of the enterprise, making it more important than ever that business users be able to access data insights. That combination has advanced analytics vendors firmly focused on offering features that make their platforms easier for business users to use.
   
   
2. Real-Time Data Streams and the Internet of Things Are Hot:
   The demand for analytics on real-time data streams is increasing rapidly as more and more devices connect to the Internet. By applying advanced analytics to streaming data, organizations can respond with much greater agility, whether that means providing personalized recommendations as you shop online, or monitoring a jet engine's key metrics to identify signs of failure before maintenance crews notice.
   
   
3. Data Visualization Is Becoming a Business Requirement:
   Data visualization is taking on an even more important role within organizations as they become flooded with streaming data, social media data, machine data and other large volumes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Visualizations are necessary to help analysts uncover insights that would simply be impossible to spot in a vortex of data tables, spreadsheets and charts.
   
   
4. Organizations Are Infusing Big Data Analytics into All Decision-Making Activities:
   It is no longer enough for analytics to be managed solely through a statistics or data analysis department. Organizations want to make analytics part of the decision-making process across all areas, including marketing, sales, operations, finance and human resources.
   
   
5. Analytics Services Are Increasingly Hosted in the Cloud:
   Advanced analytics vendors are increasingly turning to the cloud to deliver analytics capabilities in a more affordable way, making them practical beyond the large enterprises able to afford the significant expense of complex, on-premise solutions.
   
   
6. In-Database Analytics Sidestep ETL Challenges:
   Performance, data governance and security can present serious challenges to performing advanced analytics on massive data sets. In-database analytics can ease many of these challenges by giving users the ability to deploy their models in the database itself rather than moving data to an analytics environment. By performing analytics on the data in place, the users can recognize performance and efficiency gains while simplifying security and data governance because the data never leaves the secure database.

Related Products

• Software AG webMethods Apama Streaming Analytics
• IBM Cognos
• IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics