“In 2014, it will be imperative for enterprises to ensure their BI workers acquire the necessary skillsets – via education, talent acquisition, and outsourcing – to take advantage of newer and better front- and back-end technologies to improve the depth, accessibility, and effectiveness of BI implementations in their organization”, states Ovum in one of its newest research report.

The company’s largest survey of senior IT executives ever conducted reveals that navigating the tsunami of regulation around the globe requires significant investment in IT systems. Thus, the global analyst firm believes that 2014 will be a year of essential investment, especially for the financial markets, with the primary focus on investment in IT infrastructure. This investment is required for finding new opportunities to drive profit, by moving into new markets, trading venues, geographies and asset classes, while managing this additional complexity. Over two thirds of respondents queried on infrastructure spending forecasted an increase of between one and six percent in their outlay.

Meanwhile, the ongoing volatility in global markets is making profitability a challenge and, as a result, customer loyalty is declining. As neither the buy side nor the sell side can guarantee profit margins in current market conditions, both sides are set to invest in IT systems that improve service levels in the hope that it positively impacts customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty.

Rik Turner, senior analyst, financial services technology, Ovum comments: “Financial markets will face two main challenges in 2014, with the difficulties of achieving profits in a post-financial crisis environment and complying with the ever-increasing raft of rules and regulations. This will drive an increase in IT infrastructure spending, as well as a focus on servicing systems to improve customer loyalty levels.”

“Regulatory compliance will continue to be a particularly large area of spending,” adds Turner. “The ever-increasing range of rules and regulations is requiring large investments and is currently consuming as much as 40% of overall IT budgets across the financial markets”, he concludes.

The push into that direction is accompanied by the growth in BI and analytics that continue to be driven by fundamental changes in how enterprises are using information to make business decisions. Thus, to no surprise, Ovum’s Business Intelligence 2014 Trends-to-Watch report foretells a shift from a heavily IT-vested query, analysis, and reporting capability, to a more proactive and real-time decision tool for business users, which will impact on how both large and small organizations implement and spend on data initiatives.

In a nutshell, the Business Intelligence (BI) 2014 Trends-to-Watch predicts:

• In 2014, enterprises will increasingly shift away from data reporting to data discovery, enabled through self-service access and ad hoc interaction with data.
• Mobile BI will boost BI adoption, and the emergence of mobile development and management platforms will expand the range and popularity of mobile BI applications.
• BI in the cloud will continue as a growing trend among enterprises looking to reduce the cost and complexity of deployment.
• The notion of "logical data warehouse architecture" will continue to grow in importance.
• BI and analytics will continue to become more tightly coupled.
• Big Data processing frameworks will increasingly be factored into BI architectures.
• Collaborative BI is more hype than reality.

Fredrik Tunvall, information management analyst at Ovum, says: “BI and analytics remain a top-priority technology for CIOs to help companies boost revenues, improve customer service, or control costs, by making better decisions, faster. More interestingly, BI and analytics are finding a new generation of sponsors in otherwise uncharted territory, such as in the office of the CMO, who are looking to make informed decisions based on data and rigid analysis with little involvement of IT. In 2014, this will continue to favor vendors who can cater tools to this new audience with self-service, visually compelling, mobile, and sometimes cloud-based solutions.

“At the backend, in-memory databases and appliances, NoSQL technologies such as Hadoop, and new underlying data architectures as the "logical data warehouse" will help enterprises process, analyze and access growing data sets, both in terms of size and variation. (Source: Ovum)

By MediaBUZZ