The Commoditization Of BI Continues …

The commoditization – plethora of choices, price points driving down, easy access, low switching cost – of business intelligence continues at a rapid pace. Almost everyday another BI tool vendor makes an announcement to make BI available to the “masses” and increase adoption. Microstrategy joined the fray with “Microstrategy targets Excel users with Cloud Personal BI”. The theme for all these announcements is centered around “self service” BI – anyone can do it, just plug in your favorite data source and voila!, you can now churn out beautiful “analytics” and you can do it all in the “cloud”. And they finish with “you don’t need IT”…as though “IT” was something that you really don’t want to get all over you.

There’s definitely some truth to all of this and I think all this buzz is definitely helping adoption rates of BI. However, as we talk to our customers, we find that that this commoditization isn’t necessarily making it any easier for SMBs (mall and medium-sized businesses) to determine what BI tools and cloud platforms they should use or how to go about integrating and cleansing their data sources (and SMBs have plenty of disparate data silos). In many cases, even the larger medium-sized business have very small IT teams or don’t have the essential skill sets to figure out the BI picture. This is where companies like LogicMatter can and need to play a significant role in helping SMBs start to leverage and move up the BI maturity curve….and do it in a very affordable and agile manner.