BI in the Cloud: Recap of Last Week’s Forrester Technology Trends Tweet Jam

This post was written by Amanda Brandon, Spotfire Blogging Team.

Forrester Research is in the process of updating its annual report “The Top 15 Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch” and is using last week’s Tweet Jam for research.

Brian Hopkins (@practicingEA), a principal analyst with Forrester Research who covers emerging technology and its impacts on business and IT for Enterprise Architecture Professionals, hosted the July 29th Tweet Jam (hash tag #forrtttj). Brian then dissected the chat data in a blog post and delivered a nice graph below that shows the top Tweets by topics and the Tweet initiator’s industry. Analysts dominated the conversation, followed by bloggers and independents.

And the trends being discussed fall right in line with what Hopkins predicted in a recent blog post – mobile, social, cloud and data.

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The Visuals and Transcript 

Here’s the data visualization and link to the partial transcript of the chat and following it is our leader board of top Tweeters on Tech Trends in EA.

1. Brian Hopkins, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Architecture for Forrester Research  – 18.81%
2. James Kobielus, Advanced Analytics Analyst for Forrester Research – 11.47%
3. Stefan Ried, Cloud and SaaS Analyst for Forrester Research – 7.80%
4. Kieran Barr, Senior Director of Business Development at Constellation Research – 6.42%
5. Mark DiGiralamo, Director of Product Management for MetaStorm – 5.50%
6. Brett2point0, Marketing Program Manager for Spotfire – 5.05%
7. Aleks Buterman, CEO of SenseAgility Incubator – 4.59%
8. Todd Biske, Enterprise Architect at Elsevier – 4.13%
9. Barry Evelson, BI industry analyst for Forrester – 3.67%
10. Chris Detzel, senior advisor, EA Council at Forrester Research – 3.21%

Top 10 Topics from Forrester’s Report

1. Business intelligence to include predictive analytics, data mining, content and embedded analytics, big data
2. Mobile applications
3. Application platforms including software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service
4. Master data management and data governance
5. Application integration (transactional, batch, real-time, event-driven, web services, etc.)
6. Infrastructure-as-a-service, including public, private and hybrid cloud
7. Mobile platforms
8. Collaboration and social platforms- internal to your company
9. Collaboration and social platforms- with external entities such as customers
10. Business process modeling, management and automation platforms

Where is BI Headed?

Hopkins asked, “#BI is our #1 area where clients expect the most investment in the next 3 years – is it more BI as usual or something different?”

Evelson says, “Hey, #businessintelligence is the top trend. End of story.”

Grace Simrall, an independent BI consultant and founder of iGlass Analytics, said that “other verticals demanding faster dev/deploy cycles, trying to fit agile w/BI.” Additionally, she commented that “retail clients are demanding mobile, real-time, location-based BI.”

Stupekavich answered Hopkins with “#Cloud based BI has significantly cut the costs associated with traditional #BI.” He directed chat participants to our recent blog post on Making Sense (and Dollars) of Cloud-Based BI.

What’s Up with the Cloud?

A lot it seems. As you can see in Hopkins’ graphic above, the cloud is a high concern for everyone who participated in the Tweet Jam.

Some conversation points related to the cloud:

Hopkins asks, “What about the “C word” – cloud. it’s 2 big for one trend. Let’s start w/ IaaS? Are we comfortable w/ public, or will we ever b?”

Hopkins says, “A lot of talk on cloud is focusing on the cost/economics – kind of ‘getting down to business.’ It’s doesn’t always make sense.”

Stefan Ried, a Forrester analyst covering cloud and SaaS, says that there “is still a lot of innovation due in cloud infrastructure.”

TechnoMile, a software engineering services company, pointed us to a great blog post by Paul Willis in the Obashi Think! community (a methology for EA) on whether cloud computing is as safe as air travel.

Kobielus says, “Comfort w/#cloud /SaaS continues 2 grow. Comfort in SMB is very hi. Comfort in $1B+ firms growing.”

This sounds very similar to what we heard from EMA Researcher Shawn Rogers last week in our interview on BI in the cloud.

Integration is Still on the EA List…4 Years Later

This was a topic that stirred some enlivened responses. The main point: Why is it still on the Forrester list four years running as a trend? Some of the responses:

Biske says: “Integration is still there because enterprises still can’t share properly. Need to go back to Kindergarten.”

Evelson says it’s still trending “because it’s still a big challenge.”

The bottom line is that the trends were confirmed in the chat. While social bi and mobile bi didn’t make too much of an appearance in the discussion, these trends seem to support the direction of the number one trend of the moment – BI.

Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team