Courtesy of Smart Data Collective

Mobile business intelligence is becoming a leading trend within the BI market. According to Gartner, one-third of all Business Intelligence access will be through mobile devices in the next few years. Over the past several years solution providers have placed a lot of effort into developing interactive mobile applications that can be used by decision makers on the road. Although it has been a slow road to broad adoption, mobile BI is eventually fathering to make encroachments into the general business intelligence market.

It's tough to refuse the fact that most of us love our mobile phones, tablets and ipads and with technology advancements and widespread adoption of Androids, iPhones, tablets and iPads it is becoming a big tug-of-war within the office to bring business applications like business intelligence, CRM into these mobile devices. Adding to this many organizations are even adopting a 'BYOD' (Bring your Own Device) policy to get started as quickly as possible and vendors are able to provide BI offerings that allow companies to provide enhanced analytics and information access.

Expanding Mobile BI market

Speed, power, money, followed by interactive dashboards and parametric reports are the reasons for businesses to deploy mobile BI as a key element of their BI environment. The adoption of iPad and tablets eventually becomes the first choice for BI users. Predicting the potential user centric market many vendors have started their development efforts in expanding the mobile BI by bringing in attractive dashboards, user friendly navigation etc, while organizations too are slowly switching their adoption towards the mobile BI than implementing an in-house solution.

Vendor's delivery model

Companies like ZSL, expands their mobile BI offerings to meet business needs and offer high level of interactive dashboards and ease of use full spectrum BI applications that provide end users liberty to do proper decision making. Eventually these features and functionality within the mobile environment as similar as web-based or desktop application leverage an alternative solution to the BI users. Consequently organizations will no longer required the option of selecting on-premise BI; they would rather prefer a single solution choice of Mobile BI with more real-time, in-memory and advanced analytical access.

Although it is just the outset of the mobile development, more advanced solutions will be developed constantly to fulfill the growing requirement of the users on the roads. With continued growth in mobile application development and analytics integration, companies can get a complete insight of what is happening within their organization.

Rage on iPads and tablets devices

The increasing rage on iPads and tablets is yet another reason for the users to prefer mobile BI. Users have widened their adoption to iPads and Tablets PCs and vendors to support the increasing demand are developing application that can be easily be integrated with any platform. As the use of tablets and iPads are invariably increasing, BI adoption is more likely to expand exponentially within organizations as usage patterns expand to more employees

Sales Analysis and Visibility for the users

Aside from overall use, sales analysis has always been at the forefront of mobile BI adoption. This provides the basis for more in-depth analysis in relation to customers, suppliers, product movement, and industry. Therefore, sales managers and other users involved in partnering or supply chain management (SCM) will no longer need to download or refer outdated reports henceforth more opportunities in hand and more business relationships providing visibility to their business.

Mobile BI is here to stay, and will continue to grow rapidly, as employers increasingly look to keep managers and decision-makers "on the hook" on a 24×7 basis. In other words, certainly there's hope - but there's also hype.