Cloud offerings will make up just 3% of business intelligence (BI) revenue by 2013, as user adoption will lag far behind the expectations of vendors, according to Gartner.
Andreas Bitterer, research vice president at Gartner and author of the report said that despite every major BI vendor offering a cloud platform by 2013, the market will not be exempt from cloud-related hype and users will not be as keen to embrace it.
"The immediate future of the BI landscape is one of a disconnect between marketing hype about pressing challenges on the one hand and reality on the other," he said. "The need for analytics does not match most organisations” skill requirements [and] vendor hype for cloud-based BI is not reflected in revenue and customer adoption."
The report itself states: "Organisations that have already invested in on-premises BI infrastructure are hesitating to identify a segment of their BI initiative for which data can be moved into the cloud and reports and dashboards received from a cloud provider."
These thoughts echo what Donald Farmer, BI guru and QlikTech product advocate told CBR last year. "For me BI follows data and right now if you put BI in the cloud either you load your data there to analyse it or if you have BI on-premise you have to download the data to analyse it."
"When data is in the cloud it makes sense to have BI there but there isn’t enough data there at the moment. It’s an important trend and we’re ready for it but I don’t see it as critical for BI yet. Until there are more operational apps in the cloud why would you move a workload there to analyse it?"
Evanna Kearins, Director EMEA, Jaspersoft, agrees: "2011 was undoubtedly the year that cloud computing went "mainstream", but for highly established technology practices, such as business intelligence, adopting such a strategy was and is always going to be a struggle."
"Attempting to introduce an entirely new strategy alongside technology, that some organisations will have had in place for years, naturally requires a great deal of attention and, for some, may seem insurmountable," Kearins added. However, despite these low predictions by Gartner, organisations are able to turn to newer technologies to help with this adoption. The combination of the advent of PaaS and this prediction by Gartner should actually serve as an opportunity for businesses – if others are struggling, there is the genuine chance to implement a cloud strategy before others get to grips with it."
