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The ability to transform data into a competitive edge and financial benefit requires organizations to pay attention to the evolving trends in analytics across mobile and cloud applications, new data platforms and data discovery tools.
To provide education and insights about key technologies and strategies for a successful analytics program today, Database Trends and Applications recently hosted a special webcast featuring Gianthomas Volpe, product marketing manager of MicroStrategy, who covered key analytics approaches gaining ground in 2015. Here are the top 8 analytics trends for 2015, according to Volpe:
- Self-Service Data Discovery. This capability focuses on making data more accessible to everyone and not just business users. “Why is self-service important? I think self-service is permeating the way everything is done nowadays compared to 10-15 years ago,” explained Volpe. It is all about cutting down time for a response. The steps to self-service are to connect to the data, prepare the data, visualize the data, and analyze the data. It will be interesting to see how companies react to inserting governance around self-service technology, as well.
- Enterprise Dashboard Applications. Having a centralized location for each user will go a long way to help users work with data among a team of employees. One benefit is being able to bring in a high level of data quality into Office software such as PowerPoint or Word. Another benefit is only having to build one dashboard and then being able to apply that dashboard to multiple platforms instead of having to build multiple dashboards for multiple platforms.
- Mobile BI. The ability to consume data on mobile devices is becoming essential now. A few of the “must have” traits of a quality mobile BI platform are offline mode, military-grade security, native app experience, transactions, multimedia, alerts, and big data performance.
- Big Data Analytics. Big data is defined by Gartner as volume, variety, and velocity. Hadoop is one of the leading technologies that have come to the forefront because it allows for companies to quickly bring in large amounts of data.
- Advanced Analytics. Advanced analytics is a trend that has been around for a while with very specialized tools. Recently, more tools and open source have begun to make advanced analytics more mainstream. Advanced analytics is becoming less specialized and more general use.
- Secure Cloud BI. Companies are beginning to trust the value and security of the cloud. The cloud allows for low risk as far as upfront costs, thus creating low-risk investments. The benefits of secure cloud BI are global reach, elastic infrastructure, scalability, high performance reliability, speed to value, and security.
- Enterprise Security. The need for enterprise security has gone mainstream as it seems a recognized company is breached almost every other week. Cyber attacks are on the rise and breaches are very costly for the companies that become infiltrated.
- Automation in Application Development. Automation in application development will make app development tools more flexible which will be able to save thousands of man hours.
To view a replay of this webinar, go here.