IBM CIO Study: BI and Analytics are #1 Priority for 2012/2013

“Running a company is an endless quest to find out things you don’t know“

– Jeff Immelt, CEO GE

What will 2012 bring?  Recently, I attended the CIO Executive Leadership Summit in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was particularly intrigued by the presentation by the new CIO of IBM, Jeanette Horan where she presented the projects she was tackling and how IBM is thinking about business analytics.

IBM is making a bet that “true leaders” will develop the capabilities required for making good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments.

IBM is adapting to this new data analytics reality by a rapid-fire acquisition strategy:  Cognos,  Netezza, SPSS, ILog, CoreMetrics, Algorithmics, OpenPages, Clarity Systems, Emptoris, DemandTec (for retail).  IBM also has other information management assets like Watson, DB2 etc.  They are building a formidable capability around the value chain: “Raw Data -> Aggregate Data -> Intelligence ->Insight -> Decisions” . They see this as a $20Bln opportunity.

Gartner says – Business Analytics a $14.1 Bln market

The term “business intelligence” (BI) dates back to 1958, when IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn coined the term in an IBM Journal article.

However, it took until 1980s when decision support systems (DSS) became popular and mid 1990s for BI started to emerge as an umbrella term to cover software-enabled innovations in performance management, planning, reporting, querying, analytics, online analytical processing, integration with operational systems, predictive analytics and related areas.

Gartner 2014 magic quadrant shows the key players in the BI market.  The different players are differentiated based on five abilities— ability to handle large volumes of data, ability to deal with data velocity, variety (structured and unstructured), visualization capabilities and domain/vertical specific accelerators.

Market Evolution

Analytics is becoming three different markets.  First of all, there is the BI market which is actually going through quite a bit of change itself. This is a more consolidated market than we have seen in the past and there is a tremendous amount of work being done by Oracle, SAP, IBM and others to kind of retool it for the next generation of BI. So it is a growing market, lots of upgrade, replatform, modernization demand, lots of clients who are finally realizing that the tools (visualization etc.) are ready to give them some of the capability that they have historically cared about.

The second part of the market is what is called Advanced Analytics. Here you need PhD level data scientists who have backgrounds in machine learning, industry specific domain modeling, and different types of data science who can apply that in a very specific way to specific industry problems. This is a rapidly growing part of IT Services. Also, there are just not enough data scientists to go around.

The third part of the market is Analytics as a Service.  This is about leveraging software-as-a-service platforms as opposed to on-premise. This is about a business model that is more like Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Clients buy business outcomes; they don’t buy transactions and FTEs.

The analytics market has thousands of boutique consultants who are specialists in particular industries or specific technologies. It includes all the major technology providers, who are all trying to advance their business and capabilities that they are bringing to the market. And then there are vendors  who are just bringing sheer capacity of data science skills to the market and they are coming in from a completely different angle of basically just renting the expertise of their data scientists into the market.

The market is incredibly fragmented. We are in the early stages of growth in the market. Every single one of our clients is building this capability internally and they are looking for more services from vendors, because the opportunity to apply analytics is in every single one function whether it is a customer analytics, industrial Internet, e-commerce platform, is growing. Analytics is embedded into literally every single business interaction.

BI, Analytics [and Big Data] Market Sizing

More recently to support a new generation of cost cutting and growth initiatives, corporations are investing heavily to gain near real-time actionable insights (historical and predictive), and from a mix of disparate spreadsheets  and myriad of systems (legacy, internal silos, customer facing, suppliers, partners, etc.).