Big data convergence with business intelligence

Big data is growing fast as organizations devote technology resources to tapping the terabytes (if not petabytes) of data flowing into their organizations and externally in social media data and other sources. What does this all mean for business intelligence (BI) users and systems? With all the attention on advanced analytics for big data, what’s the play for BI? 

Integrating advanced analytics for big data with BI systems is an important step toward gaining full return on investment. Advanced analytics and BI can be highly complementary; advanced analytics can provide the deeper, exploratory perspective on the data, while BI systems provide a more structured user experience. BI systems’ richness in dashboard visualization, reporting, performance management metrics, and more can be vital to making advanced analytics actionable. A new generation of data visualization tools like Tableau, Clearstory, and Domo aims to unlock enterprise data for a broader audience than before. Such companies deliver interactive dashboards that pull from a variety of data sources and make it all accessible to business users. 

The market for making big data simple is much bigger than the market for peddling big data infrastructure. As such, and given the difficulty of selling support contracts for open source infrastructure. For now, however, most enterprises should be paying close attention to the data visualization vendors. In most cases, these won't be yesterday's BI vendors (all of which struggle to deal with unstructured data), but rather modern BI startups that understand that today's data is messy but can be made to tell stories with the right visualization. You can blend your Big Data with other data sources using Data Virtualization or traditional capabilities. 

The business technology landscape has been shifting so fast lately that if you turn your head for a moment and then turn back you may not recognize what you’re seeing. Advances in the markets for mobile software and cloud services just in the last few years have opened the way for an entirely new type of relationship between IT and business users. One result of this rapid change is that old boundaries between areas and practices are beginning to blur. Then there are the completely new categories no one had heard of even five years ago.