Searching for the next big thing in Business Intelligence
Like most people in the IT industry, I am always looking for the next big thing in my niche. As my company does BI consulting with IBM Cognos 8, a trend I am keenly following is the evolution of the next BI platform. Clearly, SOA, SaaS and cloud computing will have an impact, and the details are slowly becoming evident. Shawn Rogers, blogging on the b-eye-network, recently wrote about three recent developments at Google that provide some insight into the future of business intelligence:
- Panorama Software announces a BI solution that integrates with Google Docs.
- SalesForce, the poster child for hosted enterprise software, announces the integration of SalesForce with Google Apps.
- Google’s Big Table, the database component of the Google App Engine, is available for storing data “in the cloud”, opening the door for application developers to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure.
While it is debatable if Google can (or even wants to) become a player in the Enterprise BI market, they are setting trends in software development and providing clues as to what future of BI software suites will look like.
