In a May 2010 Aberdeen survey, 23% of the 146 companies polled said that they now have a mobile BI application or dashboard in place, and another 31% said that they plan to implement some type of mobile business intelligence within the next year.Īt Life Technologies, end-user demand pushed mobile BI to the top of the list of business strategies, Prasad says. These new mobile devices can handle the complexities of BI, Hatch says.Ĭompanies are responding aggressively.
It looked as though the trend would gain momentum, since several BI vendors had recently introduced mobile versions of their products.īut then the recession hit, and that stymied investment in mobile BI product development and marketing, Hatch says.īut the recession didn't stop the development of mobile gadgetry, most notably the iPhone, the iPad and the various Android phones.
Only 17% of the companies Aberdeen surveyed at that time said that they were delivering business intelligence data to mobile phones, though 78% indicated that they were interested in doing so. analyst David Hatch produced a report looking at best practices in making business intelligence available on mobile phones. To be sure, mainstream adoption of mobile BI has been on the horizon for a while now. He contends that this trend will be spurred on by improvements in smartphones' ability to display graphical information and the emergence of intuitive graphical interfaces that can better handle BI visualizations. "All enterprise companies will start moving on the mobile path," Prasad predicts. Making analytic tools and data available on today's sophisticated smartphones can give companies the ability to interact in real time with their customers and business partners, thereby improving service and boosting productivity. "It used to be that you'd see these things and say, 'It looks nice in the demo, but am I really going to be able to use this?' Now the answer is yes." That's a key development because "you couldn't use over a 2G network," he says. In addition, the field has also attracted start-ups like Mellmo and Leapfactor Inc., which operates a cloud-based service that can bring corporate BI applications to smartphones.ĭrake points out that network technology is catching up as well.
Meanwhile, software providers have renewed their mobile BI push, with several of the big business intelligence vendors making moves in that arena: SAS added a Mobile dashboard in April SAP recently introduced versions of its BusinessObjects Explorer for the iPhone and the iPad and in June IBM showed off a spiffed-up new interface for its Cognos Go Mobile BI product. He says the BlackBerry will still be used for BI, but he notes that more companies will develop applications for devices like Apple's iPad and for powerful new phones like the HTC Evo, which has a high-definition screen that makes it easier to analyze data on a mobile device. "Going forward, we'll see a whole slew of apps for sales forces and field service ," says IDC analyst Stephen Drake. Delivering business intelligence applications to employees' mobile devices will likely become a bigger phenomenon, analysts say.