Two of the industry’s research and analysis heavyweights – Gartner and Forrester – have added credence to the quickly proliferating view that consumer-oriented and collaborative Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities are set define the BI landscape in 2012.
Gartner on tablet PCs and applications for Mobile BI
Speaking at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITexpo in Australia, Gartner Vice President, David Willis, revealed Gartner’s top ten business application categories for tablet PCs.
Willis listed BI as the second most crucial commercial business application for tablet devices. Collaborative and social networking applications were also named at number four and nine respectively.
Willis said that by 2016, over 900 million tablets will be in the hands of end users, leading to the increasing consumerization of BI and other enterprise applications.
“Now, major software vendors are taking the tablet seriously and embracing the market, following where users want to take the platform”, said Willis. “By 2016, more than 900 million tablets will be in the hands of users. As more consumers buy them, they then tend to bring them to the workplace and use them for their jobs – often led by executives. Leaders are finding legitimate business use and redefining processes for ‘ready at hand’ moments where other computer types are not as well adapted.
“Success lies in how the vendor re-factors the apps in a meaningful way, rather than just duplicating the traditional desktop or browser experience.”
Gartner has also suggested that growth in mobile computing devices and consumer-oriented applications within most enterprise IT environments means that CIOs must overhaul their current mobile strategies.
“Second generation mobile strategies differ considerably from those of the first generation,” said Leif-Olof Wallin, Research Vice President at Gartner.
Wallin said that employees are behaving more like consumers, demanding a wider choice of devices, exploiting consumer devices and applications from app stores, and adopting new strategies such as ‘bring your own’ IT. As a result, the distinctions between a person’s role as an employee and as a consumer are more blurred than ever.
Worldwide tablet sales
According to Gartner’s latest forecast, worldwide media tablet sales to end-users will total 63.6 million units in 2011, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010 sales of 17.6 million units. Media tablet sales will continue to experience strong growth through to the end of 2015 when sales are forecast to reach 326.3 million units.
Combined sales of tablets and smartphones will be 44 percent bigger than the PC market in 2011, according to Gartner predictions. By the end of 2014, the installed base of devices based on new lightweight mobile operating systems like Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC based systems.
Worldwide sales of mobile devices totaled 440.5 million units in the third quarter of 2011, up 5.6 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner.
Forrester top 10 points to increasingly consumer-oriented, collaborative Mobile BI
Speaking of top ten’s, several BI commentators have began compiling fresh predictions for the New Year in analytics. Renowned Forrester blogger, Boris Evelson, also recently unveiled his top ten predications for BI in 2012.
Evelson’s fifth prediction is that Mobile BI will go mainstream – a reasonable point, but hardly a brave assumption. More interestingly, is that this, and three other Evelson extrapolations, are encapsulated in Yellowfin’s new soon-to-be-released iPad app (The application integrates Yellowfin’s renowned ease-of-use and collaborative capabilities to deliver a consumer-oriented mobile application for business analytics).
Evelson’s third prediction, relating to his first – “it’s all about getting things done” – states that BI will experience increasingly widespread user adoption and move “into the hands of end users”. The Forrester front man also underscored the growing importance of Collaborative BI, suggesting that “BI tools integrated with email and collaboration platforms” will enjoy marketplace dominance as they cater to users’ desire to replicate leisure-time experiences using technology in the workplace.
Yellowfin: Making Mobile BI even easier
Yellowfin will launch its new consumer-oriented iPad application for mobile reporting and analytics in the coming weeks. Yellowfin is making mobile analytics as fun and easy as browsing your favorite online magazine, or sharing ideas with friends across social networks.
Register for this exclusive seminar and be one of the first to see it in action!
Yellowfin offers customers the ability to receive mobile analytics out-of-the-box, and makes Mobile BI easy on any device or platform, via native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms as well as new HTML 5 integration.