Why Business Intelligence and analytics tools vendor will consolidate sooner or Later !!!

Traditional approach of using normal datawarehouse life cycle implementation is little time consuming; hence Business intelligence real benefits across industry verticals takes longer time which is why Return on Investment (RoI) were questioned in near term by business users. But majority of CEO/CIO/CFO were convinced they need to continue invest on business intelligence tools/technology if they can compete in this cut throat competition where one quote from Infosys founder Narayan Murthy is relevant “In God we believe and everybody else bring data to the discussion” which is the foundation for any strategic decision.

Slowly across industry new perspective on the BI and analytics has evolved where power has gradually shifted from IT to the business toward easy-to-use tools to support a full range of analytics capabilities and do not require significant involvement from IT. The evolution of self-service and data visualization capabilities available in the market has confirmed the same outlook. Increase adoption across industry segments lead to belief beyond enterprise business intelligence there is an area which is slowly catching-up and giving stiff competition to the already established product vendor of the likes of IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft.

BI tools were often the result of “one-off” tactical deals that did not consider the strategic needs of the entire organization / enterprise. While having all of these BI tools at your fingertips may seem like a good thing, it actually makes the typical organization / enterprise less productive, less competitive, and less profitable. Industry has seen over the years how key reporting tools being acquired by big product vendor to complement and ensure non organic growth to quickly capture the growing market segment.

Closure look at Gartner report over the years for “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms” published in 2015 to 2016; shows some key observations:

• Leaders quadrant as per 2015 report showed likes of Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAS, Microstrategy, SAS etc. {In 2016 from above list we only have Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft}
• Visionaries quadrant as per 2015 vrs. 2016 showed new entrants like ClearStory Data, BeyondCore, Logi Analytics
• Niche Players quadrant in 2016 has new entrants like Sisense, Datawatch, Board International, Sales Force, Platfora

New entrants like Hitachi or TIBCO building complete BI capability is not seen earlier year. At present some of the established BI product vendor’s do not have a good product in data visualization / Mobility space or even trying over the years not captured significant market share in the data visualization or mobility technology space.  Industry might see key data visualization or mobile BI tools being acquired by big BI product vendor to complement already established product segments.

Future can tell us who will succeed in completing acquisitions of tools like Tableau, Qlikview, RoamBI, PushBI etc. who are market leader in Data Visualization / Mobile BI space today. But it is going to be reality as new age tools of data visualization / mobile BI cannot just displace incumbent BI product vendor or sustain longer without a clear enterprise business intelligence tools capability end to end.