Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Embedded Analytics
Enterprise Apps Today recently published a column by Infostructure Associates’ Wayne Kernochan , who encourages IT buyers to begin evaluating embedded analytics solutions. As the technology matures, he says, it will offer benefits at least equal to the much-hyped Big Data analytics now on every vendor’s lips — although the benefits will come in smaller per-project increments.
There is no real rush. Kernochan suggests using a “pre-pre-short-list” approach, identifying solutions that may wind up on the embedded-analytics short list in the next two years and moving those products over to the pre-short list as their technology reaches the point where it can be applied by IT rather than being embedded in another vendor solution.
Brian Gentile, CEO of business intelligence software provider Jaspersoft, offers another bullish outlook on embedded analytics in a slideshow on IT Business Edge. Embedded analytics offers a more user-friendly approach to business intelligence, according to the slideshow, because the view of data is intuitively presented directly within an end-user’s application. A recent Aberdeen Group survey, cited in the slideshow, found ease of adoption/speed of deployment to be the biggest benefit of embedded analytics, mentioned by 53 percent of survey respondents.
Still, there are potential pitfalls associated with embedded analytics. A Datamation article points out two of them: difficulty in quantifying return on investment (ROI) and potentially high implementation costs. Despite the pitfalls, industry observers seem to believe use of embedded analytics will grow. The article quotes Gartner VP Nigel Rayner, who predicts analytics will ultimately be embedded in business processes as the technology matures.
“Today, 80 percent of embedded BI and analytics use is for inquiries, while 15 percent is for the point of decision and only 5 percent are embedded into processes,” Rayner says. “In five to 10 years, 60 percent will be in inquiry-based, 30 percent in point of decision and maybe 10 percent in processes.”
Wayne Kernochan has been an IT industry analyst and auther for over 15 years. He has been focusing on the most important information-related technologies as well as ways to measure their effectiveness over that period. He also has extensive research on the SMB, Big Data, BI, databases, development tools and data virtualization solutions. Wayne is a regular speaker at webinars and is a writer for many publications.
