Boris Evelson

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 […]

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 […]

Enterprise BI is not dead, It's alive and thriving. But there are changes ahead. Learn about five of them here.

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 […]

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 […]

Forrester has just published 2019 refreshes of our enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform Wave™ evaluations. As the BI market and the technology continue to evolve, so does our research. This year, we emphasized: New market segmentation by both vendor-managed and client-managed platforms, which roughly equate to on-premises and cloud-based platforms, respectively, but not quite. Since […]

The past two years have seen a significant divergence in the maturity of the supply and demand sides of the business intelligence (BI) market. This divergence will influence market dynamics for the next two years and affect enterprise insights leaders making strategic vendor and platform decisions. Specifically, the: Supply side is very mature. BI technology […]

I recently had the privilege (not to mention a lot of fun) to participate in a brainstorming session with a large enterprise software vendor and my esteemed colleagues John Rymer, Rob Koplowitz, and Jeffrey Hammond on the topic of low-code app dev. It’s not a well-known fact (but Forrester has been publicizing it for a […]

The business intelligence (BI) market is going through a round of significant consolidation. Earlier this month, Sisense acquired Periscope Data; last week, Google announced its intention to acquire Looker; and today, Salesforce announced the intention to acquire Tableau Software. A smaller company, Logi Analytics, has also been on an acquisition spree, acquiring Zoomdata today and […]

Information technology keeps moving forward at an ever-increasing pace. Business intelligence (BI) technology isn’t falling behind and keeps constantly evolving. Gone are the days when vendors categorized themselves as: IT-focused and enterprise-scalable vs. business-user-focused BI platforms mostly going after departmental and line of business use cases. All legacy, formerly IT-focused BI vendors have moved squarely […]

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 […]