Service-Oriented Architecture for Business Intelligence Will Grow Significantly Over the Next Year
The majority of respondents of Ventana Researchs new study on Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) for Business Intelligence (BI) said their companies plan to implement BI services within the next twelve months. Yet the number one cited action needed to adopt BI services was to acquire general knowledge about SOA. The survey defined a “BI service” as a software component that provides a service such as data connectivity, movement and transformation; semantic mapping and master data management; query, reporting and analysis; and dashboarding, scorecarding and alerting.
“Companies believe SOA is important for BI and plan to implement BI services across all functional areas of their business within the next year,” said Dan Everett, Research Director for Business Intelligence at Ventana Research. “However, the research reveals a lack of technical understanding in many organizations and an acknowledgement that outside help will be required for initial implementations.”
Among the key research findings, Ventana Research found:
- SOA is important for BI: The vast majority (81%) of respondents said SOA is important to some degree for BI, and most believe every functional area of the business will receive value from BI services.
- Implementation plans are aggressive: Over half of respondents said they plan to implement front-end query and reporting services and back-end data services within the next 12 months and customer operations (43%) and finance (32%) were top business areas slated for early deployments.
- More education and skill development is needed: Only one third of respondents said they would use internal personnel to implement BI services and many cited general knowledge about SOA (53%) and identifying the IT resources required to migrate to and support SOA for BI (48%) as barriers to adoption.
The research, sponsored by technology providers Cognos and Composite Software, is based on an analysis of 488 validated respondents. The survey was conducted with the assistance of media partners that included BI Review, BusinessIntelligence.com, DM Review, Intelligent Enterprise, Softwaremag.com and Technology Evaluation Center.
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