The Future of Business Intelligence

Mikael Hagström, Executive Vice President of SAS EMEA and Asia Pacific Operations

Over the past few months, we conducted interviews with SAS executives, industry experts and leading research analysts – asking each the same set of questions about the role of business intelligence (BI) in the next two to five years. Here, Mikael Hagström, Executive Vice President of SAS EMEA and AP Operations, talks about the need for industry-focused solutions and best-of-suite technologies.

What is your vision of how business intelligence will be used two to five years from now?

What we are seeing in the market already, and that trend will certainly continue, is that organizations are looking for solutions in particular industry areas. They want to optimize their time to intelligence and the speed with which they can implement systems. The more innovative vendors will have discovered the organizations’ need for an intelligence strategy and will move organizations forward from their current, so-called, best-of-breed environments of today onto a platform that’s designed as a best-of-suite or end-to-end enterprise intelligence platform [also known as a business intelligence platform].

What capabilities will be widely available in BI solutions of the future?

Organizations will increasingly move away from transactional database systems to implement fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms that can efficiently disseminate intelligence across their organizations. Many manufacturing companies, especially in Europe, implemented SAP under the promise that it would solve all their intelligence problems as well as run their day-to-day businesses. That’s not been the case. Just as an enterprise resource planning platform is needed for the operational side of the business, an enterprise intelligence platform with all components fully integrated is and will continue to be needed for the intelligence side of the business.

As data volumes increase, for example in China or in India where banks will have hundreds of millions of customers, it will be increasingly difficult to process and analyze that data with a system not designed to perform those functions. Transactional databases are designed to do transaction work, and I think that will become increasingly clear to the market and will drive the greater use of enterprise intelligence platforms.

Also, organizations will increasingly demand industry solutions – from telecom to manufacturing – that will be at the heart of their enterprise intelligence strategies. Certain vendors will continue to advocate a best-of-breed strategy that would require their personnel to integrate the different solutions. SAS is integrated already.

What should organizations be doing now to help lay the foundation for long-term BI strategies?

Organizations should look at their existing environments and compare fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms in terms of speed of development and speed of execution. They can also look at deploying specific industry solutions as a first step, and then plan to add on solutions within the same managed concept, same metadata environment and same industry business model. Organizations should be aware of and consider deploying a platform designed to provide true business benefits, such as shorter times to intelligence, for all their BI solutions. 

How might the BI vendor landscape change in the next two to five years?

Organizations will look to acquire BI from enterprise players rather than specific tools providers. Enterprise vendors will have to establish value, ongoing return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Organizations, especially in eastern countries such as India where change is embraced, increasingly will look at which vendor will give them the best benefits, which has best adapted its solutions to their industries and their departments and which is extremely robust at the technical level. Vendors will no longer be able to rely on size and name recognition alone. They will have to prove their value and become strategic partners for customers.