Boris Evelson

Over the last five years, most large enterprises have slowly but surely matured from being data-aware to data-driven. They all collect data from operational and transactional applications; process the data into data lakes, data hubs, data warehouses, and data marts; and build business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications to understand what the data is telling […]

I recently answered a client question regarding an application that could be based on either business intelligence (BI) or text analytics technology. Question: “We receive quarterly and yearly account statements for our investments. Each statement will contain key pieces of information, such as total contributions, expenses, interest income, etc. However, each vendor may format their […]

Qlik, a Leader in our recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation on business intelligence (BI), has acquired Podium Data, a Contender in our big data fabric Wave. In a humble opinion of yours truly, this is further proof of a trend showing that BI buyers are increasingly seeking end-to-end platforms and solutions, rather than separate BI/ETL components that need […]

Enterprises are sitting on mountains of unstructured data — 61% have more than 100 terabytes, and 12% have more than five petabytes! Luckily, there are mature technologies out there that can help. First, enterprise information architects should consider general-purpose text analytics platforms. These are capable of handling most, if not all, text analytics use cases, both […]

I’ve been watching this trend with great curiosity (and first wrote about it in 2008). On the one hand, software product vendors are slowly but surely migrating from just selling products to selling solutions — and solutions always require professional services. IBM led the trend when it acquired PwC Consulting in 2002. For the last few […]

In most enterprises, data access is a fait accompli: 72% of global data and analytics decision makers say that they can access the data they need to obtain insights in a timely manner.  However, even the most modern BI tools that make data more accessible still require significant subject matter expertise to find the right […]

Most business intelligence (BI) applications are constructed using point-and-click drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces (GUI), but still require end user training and long ramp up times, although not to the extent of learning and writing SQL code. Few business decision-makers access data directly, instead rely on trained business analysts, even for basic information. Modern BI tools […]

Look right, look left, you’ll see a fellow CIO contemplating their AI move. Failing to act is not an option in most organizations. However, as enterprises are kicking off their AI pilots or seeing early results, the honeymoon is over as enterprises that naively celebrated the cure-all promises of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is over. Enterprises needed better data foundations. They underestimated the level of business expertise […]

Large enterprise software vendors seem to be enamoured with using the names of historical figures or literary characters as brand names. Unfortunately, this is really confusing for the buyers, since the vendors apply these branding names differently. For example (in an increasing order of branding approach complexity): OpenText Magellan is a collection of business intelligence […]

Business Intelligence (BI) pros continue to look for outside professional services. Forty-nine percent of decision makers say their firms are already engaging and/or expanding their engagements with outside data and analytic service providers, and another 22% plan to do so in the next 12 months. There are two main reasons for this sustained trend: The […]

No. The buy side market is nowhere near maturity and will continue to be a greenfield opportunity to many BI vendors. Our research still shows that homegrown shadow IT BI applications based on spreadsheets and desktop databases dominate the enterprises. And only somewhere between 20% and 50% of enterprise structured data is being curated and […]

Business intelligence (BI) is a runaway locomotive that keeps picking up speed in terms of enterprise interest, adoption, and spending levels. The result: Forrester now tracks 73(!) vendors in the segment. Their architectures and user interfaces vary, but they support similar use cases. Forrester started the original research with fewer than 30 vendors in 2014 and ended […]

Stop! Before you invest even 10 minutes of your precious time reading this blog, please make sure it's really business intelligence (BI) governance, and not data governance best practices, that you are looking for. BI governance is a key component of data governance, but they're not the same. Data governance deals with the entire spectrum […]

So you have gone through the Discover and Plan of your Business Intelligence (BI) strategy and are ready to staff your BI support organization. What skills, experience, expertise and qualifications should you be looking for? Since the term BI is often used to also include data management processes and technologies, let’s assume that in your case […]

Lots of my clients are confused. They start a Forrester inquiry with a question about data visualization capabilities, but when I lead them into discussion about business intelligence (BI) platforms, they say "but we already have a BI platform. All we really want is an ability to create and share data visualizations". Is there a […]

Over the past several years, Forrester's research has written extensively about the age of the customer. Forrester believes that only the enterprises that are obsessed with winning, serving, and retaining customers will thrive in this highly competitive, customer-centric economy. But in order to get a full view of customer behavior, sentiment, emotion, and intentions, Information […]

with Martha Bennett   CIO pushback is part of a typical growing pain of all business intelligence (BI) startups. It means your land and expand strategy is working. Once you start expanding beyond a single department CIOs will notice. As a general rule, the earlier the CIO is brought on board, the better. CIOs who […]

Delivering broad access to data and analytics to a diverse base of users is an intimidating task, yet it is an essential foundation to becoming an insights-driven organization. To win and keep customers in an increasingly competitive world, firms need to take advantage of the huge swaths of data available and put it into the […]

One of the reasons for only a portion of enterprise and external (about a third of structured and a quarter of unstructured -) data being available for insights is a restrictive architecture of SQL databases. In SQL databases data and metadata (data models, aka schemas) are tightly bound and inseparable (aka early binding, schema on […]