Gartner recently published a new research note called ‘Market Trends: The Collision of Data Discovery and Business Intelligence Will Cause Destruction.’ (Data discovery is Gartner’s term for Business Discovery.)
A helpful team of operatives stood by to produce reports and make changes to the old BI platform’s semantic model…
The Gartner report sets out two possible scenarios:
1) “Data Discovery Becomes a Feature.” In this scenario, Business Discovery would become subsumed in broad BI platforms as traditional BI vendors copy or buy lookalike functionality.
2) “Data Discovery: The Leading New Analytic Architecture”. According to the report, “In this scenario, data discovery muscles out and replaces the BI platform for a majority of analytical/diagnostic use cases.”
In this second scenario Gartner highlights a key shift in priorities “Whereas previously, users were looking to have a portfolio of: (1) a BI platform (semantic layers providing the end-to-end spectrum of reporting, ad hoc query and OLAP functionality); (2) data discovery in a tactical fashion, adopted individually or in workgroups; and in some cases (3) statistical/predictive analysis tools; the selection criteria has shifted to look like this: (1) data discovery (now the central norm for analysis on all data sources, and where most BI budget goes); (2) production and external reporting tools for systems of record; and (3) additional statistical/predictive analysis capabilities.”
Business Discovery is now being viewed by industry analysts as a viable mainstream alternative to traditional BI, which should prompt thinking about the investments organizations are making to meet their analytic needs. Do they want to continue to spend the majority of their BI budget on top-down reporting led approaches, or switch over to user driven discovery and diagnosis? For many QlikView customers, Business Discovery is already the “Leading New Analytic Architecture.”
Gartner gives no indication as to which scenario it expects to prevail in the long term.
