Boris Evelson
Vice President, Principal Analyst

Author Insights
Blog
ThoughtSpot Acquires Mode Analytics, Goes After Data Pros
In the recently published report, The Forrester Wave™: Augmented Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2023, we wrote that “ThoughtSpot’s continued focus on conversational user experience (UX) is no longer differentiating.” ThoughtSpot’s announced acquisition of Mode Analytics on June 26 is perhaps a means for ThoughtSpot to grow beyond its historical business user-focused strength in UX. Mode […]
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Key Findings From Forrester’s Latest BI Research, Including The Forrester Wave™: Augmented Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2023
Enterprise business intelligence (BI) continues to be the last mile to insights-driven business capabilities. No matter what technology foundation you’re using — a data lake, a data warehouse, data fabric, data mesh, etc. — BI applications are where business users consume data and turn it into actionable insights and decisions. The BI market has thrived […]
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Are LLMs Poised To Be A Great Business Intelligence Equalizer? Not Yet.
Despite all the talk about generative AI, one largely ignored area where generative AI will have a disruptive impact is enterprise analytics, specifically business intelligence. Learn six areas where vendor capabilities are emerging.
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BI Vendors Can’t Resist The Sheen Of Data Fabric
Learn the the two most significant trends that Forrester has been observing in the data and analytics space and what their implications are for your tech organization.
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Salesforce Genie: One More Enterprise Data Warehouse And Analytics Option
Dear Salesforce, haven’t I been a good, objective, reasonable, helpful industry analyst? Why would you make my life more difficult? For years, clients have been reaching out with the following question: If a significant portion of all my enterprise data comes from SAP or Oracle business applications (ERP, CRM, etc.), should SAP BW/4HANA or Oracle […]
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Get AI Right With AI Service Providers
AI can deliver value, but getting it right is a challenge. We’ve seen AI deployed successfully, like the program that discovered 20,000 undeclared pools, and less successfully, like the computer-generated rapper that was dropped by its record label over racist stereotypes. To apply AI successfully, you not only need to get the data and modeling […]
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The State Of The Insights-Driven Business, 2022
Firms with advanced insights-driven business (IDB) capabilities continue to outpace their competition and deliver better growth than less mature firms. What differentiates these firms is that they have consistently invested time, effort, and resources across the five IDB competencies: strategy, data, platforms, internal partners, and practices. In our latest, updated research, we found that more […]
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Data Into Dollars: Can You Turn Your Data Into Revenue?
Forrester's research shows that advanced insights-driven businesses were 8.5 times more likely to report at least 20% revenue growth in 2021.
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The Future Of BI — No, It’s Not As Simple As “The Dashboards Are Dead”
BI is alive, but its adoption needs some help. Learn the three reasons why businesses struggle to get more mileage from their business intelligence applications.
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Build Your Insights Capabilities To Leapfrog Competition
Insights are critical for delivering the experiences that customers demand. Learn what it takes to become a more insights-driven business.
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Long-Form Natural Language Generation Is In Play This Week
A Forrester recommendation in a recent report is coming to fruition. In our Augmented BI Holds New Promises, But It’s Still Early Days report, we recommended to “find the right balance between customization and automation in NLG.” We also described two forms of natural language generation (NLG) for analytics: short-form NLG — automated but limited […]
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The Future Of BI: Augmented And Personalized
Will AI change how users gain insights from their BI platforms? The answer is ... complicated. Join us at Data Strategy & Insights to find out more.
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The BI Fabric Baby Is Slowly But Surely Growing Up
BI fabric has been growing, but slowly. Learn the five architectures and technologies where it's expanding most.
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Qualtrics’ $1.125B Acquisition Of Clarabridge Upends The Customer Feedback Management Market
Yesterday evening, Qualtrics announced that it’s acquiring Clarabridge in an all-stock deal worth $1.125 billion. This is a great move for Qualtrics. In one swoop, it has secured the best-in-class analytics capabilities that will define the future of voice-of-the-customer programs as firms decrease their reliance on surveys and focus instead on understanding customers based on […]
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Push-Down Query Capabilities: Five Questions To Ask Your Cloud BI Provider
Learn how to balance your need for a hybrid environment with the benefits of an elastic cloud-based BI platform.
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TIBCO’s Acquisition Of Information Builders Signals More BI Market Consolidation
The business intelligence (BI) vendor consolidation trend that started earlier in 2019 continues. Today, TIBCO announced its intent to acquire Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) — one of the oldest players in the market. Want to get the real sense of how far back IBI goes? It was one of the first vendors to offer reporting and analytics on mainframes! It still does, and it’s quite a unique capability today, only […]
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Amplify Intelligence With AI And Analytics — Forrester’s Virtual Data & Insights Forum, October 13–15
They say data is the new oil. They say data is the new currency. They say data is the key competitive differentiator. All true. But reality is sobering: Only 7% of firms report advanced, insights-driven practices. Respondents to the same survey claimed that less than half (49%) of all business decisions in their enterprise are […]
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BI Is Dead; Long Live BI
Enterprise BI is not dead, It's alive and thriving. But there are changes ahead. Learn about five of them here.
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Just Published: Dual Forrester Wave™ Evaluations On Text Analytics
Enterprises have been successfully leveraging analytics platforms such as business intelligence (BI), predictive analytics based on machine learning (PAML), cognitive search, and others for multiple applications and use cases for decades. That has not been the case with text analytics or natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Forrester tracks over a hundred vendors whose platforms are […]
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Data, Analytics, And Insights Investments Produce Tangible Benefits — Yes, They Do
If you set out to build a “boil the ocean” business case for why to invest in data, analytics, and insights initiatives — stop. Use your precious time to instead focus on prioritizing the investment categories across where you are in your business-insights maturity, because they will yield tangible benefits — both top- and bottom-line […]
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