Gartner’s top 10 trends for 2010 set the stage for Cloud computing and Analytics.

Analytics is context driven, and presents actionable results to the business user. BI allows the user to slice and dice data. BI is good if you know what you are looking for. The reason Gartner placed analytics above BI is because of the needs of businesses today to act on data, as opposed to merely having access to it.  There is way too much data. We do not need systems that create more data - we need intelligence from the data, which is what Analytics does. Hence the positioning of Analytics on the Gartner charts.

BI has become pervasive, as it should be. It has even entered open source with Pentaho and Jaspersoft, a sure sign of being pervasive!  However, this was inevitable as every business user needs easy access to their data. A recent survey conducted by B Eye Network involving more than 1,000 respondents from around the globe found that only 12 percent said they had no plans to use open source software in some form for business intelligence applications or data warehouses.

However – converting the data to intelligence, and actionable intelligence in the next frontier. That is why Gartner placed Analytics in their top 10 trends chart, and moved BI out! As we have watched with Google analytics, the analytics on web traffic data is pervasive. There are a myriad of products that provide analytics on web stats, but Google provides a universal product ensuring that everyone has access to it.

Analytics on corporate data will also become pervasive. Companies are demanding this. The analytics will be contextual, as this is required for analytics to automatically make sense out of data. The analytics will be agile and companies will be able to pour their data in, and watch the results take shape. Much like Google analytics on web traffic data.

Emcien’s analytics offers analytics on sales data.  The context is sales and customer buying patterns. Companies can now pour the sales data and watch the customer buying patterns emerge. No data mapping and model building.  No long implementation cycles! The ability to “just turn on and use” is key to being pervasive.

The future is here!