Cloud Business Intelligence - what do we know about this market?

Cloud Business Intelligence in 2020

Answers to the above questions are provided in an interesting report by Dresner Advisory Services 2020 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study. The authors focused on implementation trends and the attitude of end-users from various industries to cloud solutions and Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

More than half (54%) of the respondents considered the implementation of cloud solutions in the SaaS (Software as a Service) model as one of the keys or essential elements for their future business activities. The most popular technology platform providers mentioned in the report are

- Microsoft Azure (77% of indications),

- Amazon Web Services (33%),

- Google Cloud (22%).

Key features of Cloud BI

Among the most needed and desired features offered by BI systems, the respondents included: advanced possibilities of obtaining data from various sources, improving their quality and easy integration with their databases. They also appreciated the relative ease of use (end-user self-service), the possibility of advanced systems personalization, visualization of results, ad-hoc queries and the possibility of online reporting. Less importance is attached to video analysis, social media analysis (Social BI), complex event processing (CEP) or text and natural language analysis.

Who uses cloud solutions?

Cloud BI solutions are currently most commonly used by manufacturing companies (58%), financial services companies (40%) and business services companies (40%). Restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic caused a dynamic increase in interest in applications and cloud platforms in the education industry, whose representatives declare the most ambitious plans among all sectors covered by the survey.

Users' expectations of systems vary depending on the sector in which they operate. Business service providers emphasize the importance of supporting relational databases, Open Client interfaces and the ability to query third-party cloud applications in real-time. For the education industry, the ease of connection to the user's local software (on-premise), automatic system updates, web service APIs or data virtualization is essential. The possibility of supporting multidimensional databases mainly attracts the attention of financiers.

Will the BI systems market continue to develop dynamically?

The report shows that companies from the United States and the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) offer the most significant interest in solutions based on cloud computing. They have declared supporters among research and development (R&D) staff, executive and operational directors and supply chain managers. Respondents unanimously stress the advantage of cloud solutions over the traditional on-premise model, which is based on the recipient's own IT resources.

"We have been monitoring the Cloud BI market since 2012 when the industry was just beginning. Since then, there has been a steady increase in the number of public cloud BI deployments. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, we expect this trend to accelerate", concluded Howard Dresner, founder and Research Director at Dresner Advisory Services.