SAP BI in today’s world of business intelligence

The era of business intelligence sweeps every businesses and organization across the world. And the evolution of various business intelligence platforms eased the incorporation of artificial intelligence and strategic approaches in various types of business environment. SAP BI being the leading business intelligence platform, there is a need to understand the current situation of Business Intelligence to make the most out of the business platform.

Global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market is forecast to reach $16.9 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc.

The BI and analytics market are in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, self-service analytics. As a result, the modern business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) platform has emerged to meet new organizational requirements for accessibility, agility, and deeper analytical insight.

"The shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has now reached a tipping point," said Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner. "Organizations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources."

Involving every type of businesses

Gartner says that as analytics has become increasingly strategic to most businesses and central to most business roles, every business is an analytics business, every business process is an analytics process and every person is an analytics user.

"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to be experts only in branding and ad placement," said Mr. Bertram. "They must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries."

To meet the time-to-insight demanded by today's competitive business environment, many organizations want to democratize analytics capabilities via self-service.

Defining the modern BI and analytics platform

The most significant difference between a modern BI and analytics platform and a traditional, IT-centric reporting and analysis platform is the amount of upfront modeling required, as well as the skills needed, to build analytics content (see Table 1). Creating analytics content via IT-centric reporting platforms starts with IT consolidating and modeling data in advance. By contrast, a modern BI&A platform supports the IT-enabled development of analytics content.