Business Intelligence tools becoming more sought after

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are becoming more sought after as enterprises recognise how actionable insights can encourage agility and organic growth.

This is according to a new report by Kable, the market intelligence specialist, which focuses on the business intelligence landscape, the recent trends, drivers, and inhibitors shaping it.

The need to enhance customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and identify and remove unproductive business processes are other key drivers providing momentum to analytics solutions, Kable says.

When it comes to BI tools, those with self-service functions and features are superior, according to the report.

In the past, enterprises have been faced with the challenge of loading data into data warehouses using the traditional ETL process.

This has proved to be quite time consuming and see enterprises looking for alternative solutions. As a result vendors are often looking to embed data loading, integration and cleansing features into their BI tools as a self-service functionality, Kable says.

Another key challenge in regards to BI is the lack of skilled professionals, according to Kable.

The report highlights the fact that rapid development in the area of BI has resulted in a huge talent gap in the market.

It says enterprises are finding it tough to employ personnel possessing the skill sets needed to create complex predictive models and analyse the unstructured data coming from various third-party sources.

Even so, over the past few years cost has been the biggest barrier to the adoption of analytics solutions, says Kable.

However, the report shows key developments to solutions have reduced this barrier to some extent.

For instance, some vendors have included developments that provides enterprises the option to deploy on-demand solutions on a pay-per-use basis. This makes them affordable to enterprises of all sizes, says Kable.