Boris Evelson

Dear Salesforce, haven’t I been a good, objective, reasonable, helpful industry analyst? Why would you make my life more difficult? For years, clients have been reaching out with the following question: If a significant portion of all my enterprise data comes from SAP or Oracle business applications (ERP, CRM, etc.), should SAP BW/4HANA or Oracle […]

AI can deliver value, but getting it right is a challenge. We’ve seen AI deployed successfully, like the program that discovered 20,000 undeclared pools, and less successfully, like the computer-generated rapper that was dropped by its record label over racist stereotypes. To apply AI successfully, you not only need to get the data and modeling […]

Firms with advanced insights-driven business (IDB) capabilities continue to outpace their competition and deliver better growth than less mature firms. What differentiates these firms is that they have consistently invested time, effort, and resources across the five IDB competencies: strategy, data, platforms, internal partners, and practices. In our latest, updated research, we found that more […]

Forrester's research shows that advanced insights-driven businesses were 8.5 times more likely to report at least 20% revenue growth in 2021.

BI is alive, but its adoption needs some help. Learn the three reasons why businesses struggle to get more mileage from their business intelligence applications.

Insights are critical for delivering the experiences that customers demand. Learn what it takes to become a more insights-driven business.

A Forrester recommendation in a recent report is coming to fruition. In our Augmented BI Holds New Promises, But It’s Still Early Days report, we recommended to “find the right balance between customization and automation in NLG.” We also described two forms of natural language generation (NLG) for analytics: short-form NLG — automated but limited […]

Will AI change how users gain insights from their BI platforms? The answer is ... complicated. Join us at Data Strategy & Insights to find out more.

BI fabric has been growing, but slowly. Learn the five architectures and technologies where it's expanding most.

Yesterday evening, Qualtrics announced that it’s acquiring Clarabridge in an all-stock deal worth $1.125 billion. This is a great move for Qualtrics. In one swoop, it has secured the best-in-class analytics capabilities that will define the future of voice-of-the-customer programs as firms decrease their reliance on surveys and focus instead on understanding customers based on […]

Learn how to balance your need for a hybrid environment with the benefits of an elastic cloud-based BI platform.

The business intelligence (BI) vendor consolidation trend that started earlier in 2019 continues. Today, TIBCO announced its intent to acquire Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) — one of the oldest players in the market. Want to get the real sense of how far back IBI goes? It was one of the first vendors to offer reporting and analytics on mainframes! It still does, and it’s quite a unique capability today, only […]

They say data is the new oil. They say data is the new currency. They say data is the key competitive differentiator. All true. But reality is sobering: Only 7% of firms report advanced, insights-driven practices. Respondents to the same survey claimed that less than half (49%) of all business decisions in their enterprise are […]

Enterprise BI is not dead, It's alive and thriving. But there are changes ahead. Learn about five of them here.

Enterprises have been successfully leveraging analytics platforms such as business intelligence (BI), predictive analytics based on machine learning (PAML), cognitive search, and others for multiple applications and use cases for decades. That has not been the case with text analytics or natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Forrester tracks over a hundred vendors whose platforms are […]

If you set out to build a “boil the ocean” business case for why to invest in data, analytics, and insights initiatives — stop. Use your precious time to instead focus on prioritizing the investment categories across where you are in your business-insights maturity, because they will yield tangible benefits — both top- and bottom-line […]

Forrester has just published 2019 refreshes of our enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform Wave™ evaluations. As the BI market and the technology continue to evolve, so does our research. This year, we emphasized: New market segmentation by both vendor-managed and client-managed platforms, which roughly equate to on-premises and cloud-based platforms, respectively, but not quite. Since […]

The past two years have seen a significant divergence in the maturity of the supply and demand sides of the business intelligence (BI) market. This divergence will influence market dynamics for the next two years and affect enterprise insights leaders making strategic vendor and platform decisions. Specifically, the: Supply side is very mature. BI technology […]

I recently had the privilege (not to mention a lot of fun) to participate in a brainstorming session with a large enterprise software vendor and my esteemed colleagues John Rymer, Rob Koplowitz, and Jeffrey Hammond on the topic of low-code app dev. It’s not a well-known fact (but Forrester has been publicizing it for a […]