Executive Summary: ISG Provider Lens™ Analytics - Platforms and Solutions - U.S. 2021
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- ISG Provider Lens™ Analytics - Platforms and Solutions - Self-Service Analytics and BI Platforms - U.S. 2021
- ISG Provider Lens™ Analytics - Platforms and Solutions - Data Preparation & Integration Platforms - U.S. 2021
Data Democratization Driven by Natural Language Querying and Conversational AI Capabilities
Despite the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, there is some restitution in the form of investments for digital transformation while keeping the economy and organization employees upbeat. Under the broader umbrella of digital transformation, data analytics has been gaining significant traction across the board across departments and lines of business.
At the same time, many enterprises are rushing into the data-centric fray without a sound strategy or roadmap. While some of them have a strategy in place, they still face challenges on where to start, which data to consider or how will it impact business outcome. The pandemic has not only accelerated the analytics transformation but has allowed enterprises and service providers to prioritize investments and innovations to support this journey.
ISG has identified specific categories that can generate a significant market demand. Two platform categories, namely self-service BI and data preparation and integration platforms, have started gaining attention. Enterprises are actively investing in these platforms to actively scale their analytics projects with a focus on data quality, data democratization and monetization.
Business leaders are increasingly vying for a holistic and unified analytics platform that can provide end-to-end functionalities ranging from data search, collection, collation to analysis, reporting and visualization. However, commercially available platforms do not exactly meet these requirements. Several factors, such as the sheer complexity of enterprise data environments, data and analytics maturity, digitalization of the business environment, and siloed data operations, have hindered deployment of unified data analytics platforms. Instead, enterprises choose to invest in multipleplatforms, such as for data preparation and integration, data science, data management and self-service business intelligence (BI), with the necessary features and functionalities that suit their analytics requirements. In particular, data preparation and integration platforms have been gaining more importance as these lay the foundation for a strong data-centric organization. Business executives are understanding the importance of the ability of these platforms to identify, cleanse, combine, enrich and in some cases transform the available horde of data into meaningful relationships that can be fed into subsequent steps to make them highly available across departments and functions.
While the number of data preparation and integration vendors has grown significantly, the market is continuing to witness the entry of new breed of vendors with specialization and can enable better connectivity to multiple data sources. Traditionally, strong enterprise vendors such as SAP, SAS and Oracle have dominated smaller players, but it is to be seen whether their heavy reliance on their own platforms and enterprise systems will continue to drive growth. The market is also undergoing an increasing shift, with enterprises moving away from these traditional vendors and preferring lighter and SaaS-based versions of enterprise systems for their enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain needs. This has enabled those vendors to better strategize and position themselves in the data integration market.
Players with offerings and experience in handling enterprise data in a cloud environment, such as Zoho and LTI, have made their foray with new products for data preparation and integration. The market is also witnessing the rise of vendors that are providing services for data collection and connectivity for cloud. ISG expects this trend to gain traction as enterprises are relying on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments for their business requirements.
To a large extent, the growth data preparation and integration market is continuing to be channeled through service providers. However, platform providers with lighter versions and smaller organizations prefer to deploy solutions on their own with specialized data engineering support staff. Enterprises approach service providers to get best-of-breed options depending on their existing IT environment, analytics maturity and business objectives. Service providers are investing heavily in competitive products and to get their employees certified, allowing them to showcase vendor or platform agnosticism and a variety of options.
Platforms are typically offered in both on-premises and software-as-a-service deployment options, with the latter gaining significant growth. While data preparation and integration platforms are increasingly witnessing hybrid installations, SaaS-based deployments of self-service BI is increasing due to the ease of use and centralized management. Besides the obvious benefits of high availability and lower cost of operations, SaaS-based self-service also offers significant advantages in democratizing data with secure access and controls.
Although service providers partner with various platform vendors, they are also investing and co-innovating with specialized partnership programs for expanding their presence and portfolio capabilities. With service providers beginning to roll out accelerators andin-house solutions to replace third-party platforms, vendors are trying to further strengthen their relationship with providers on the co-innovation front.
Many platforms are witnessing a growing shift towards self-service and low-code/no-code based design and user interface to enhance the user experience. Vendors are understanding that users should not be bound by technical programming or coding capabilities and should be allowed to focus on generating insights, especially as data democratization and citizen analysts are becoming prevalent across the enterprise. Vendors with experience in handling enterprise systems are gaining a better foothold as they are adept in designing and developing rich user interface that suits non-technical users and executives.
Self-service BI platform market trends:
- Conversational BI and querying using natural language are becoming standard features across platforms to enable non-technical users and executives to gain deeper insights from available data. While the querying is still in text mode with the typical “what-if,” time-series and other traditional relationship-based querying, ISG expects better cognitive capabilities and voice-enabled querying to follow soon. Providers should be wary of the different form factors where BI platforms are used and need to strategize accordingly.
- The user interface and general design of BI tools are shifting towards storytelling and interactive platforms that allow analysts and users of the reporting tools to become more data centric with their business decision making. These initiatives are also targeted at executives and the functional line of business managers to drive deeper insights and better understand key performance metrics.
- There are more modular and complementary solutions to accommodate different data sources, data cleansing and data collation and drive better visualization. These modular solutions and accelerators also provide quick insights with pre-built templates that are designed specifically for verticals, business functions and KPIs.
Data preparation and integration platform market trends:
- These platforms are already gearing to accommodate next-generation data sources, including social media, IoT, video and emotion analysis. Aside from unstructured data, semi-structured data such as these are becoming valuable to drive insights from branding, behavior, preferences and personalization.
- Vendors are developing numerous connectors to ensure that their platforms can handle data from across sources, whether legacy, mainframe or next-generation types. These connectors are modular in nature and are used for specific data source connectivity depending on client requirements. ISG expects such connectors to gain traction, with the presence of dedicated marketplaces for clients to choose and deploy, preferably on a usage-based pricing model.
- Vendors are increasingly investing in co-innovation and partnerships with hyperscalers and data analytics service providers to help generate frameworks, accelerators and connectors to better handle data preparation and integration. This also allows them to better prepare for the ongoing shift to multi-cloud and hybrid environments across industries.
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