Businesses avails BI data to customers

Organisations are beginning to make their business intelligence (BI) data available to customers outside of the business, according to Stephen Brobst, CTO of data warehousing and analytics firm Teradata, reports Computing.

An emerging trend for BI technology sees the data, which before now had been largely used inside the enterprise, consumed by customers via mobile devices, smartphones and tablets.

In an exclusive interview with Computing at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011 in London, Brobst stated that the most advanced users of BI are looking to use it to strengthen relations with customers.

IBM, Oracle and SAP, along with Microsoft, remain in the analyst firm's prized upper-right Leaders Quadrant, and they still dominate BI market share, the report finds, reveals Information Week.

But non-IT buyers are gravitating to easy-to-use data discovery tools, which moved up in the report.

And bowing to growing customer demand, Gartner has added several low-cost BI platforms to its Quadrant for the first time.

MicroStrategy has plans to release a series of new BI products for Apple mobile devices at its annual user conference in Las Vegas, states eCRM Guide.

According to a report, this includes transactional data systems and on-demand deployments.

"The company is rolling out additional ways to visualise data on iPads and iPhones, including 'heat map' and calendar-style presentations. Another new feature will enable in-memory data stores on mobile devices to receive new information without having to recreate the whole repository, said the company in a statement.