Deeper insights into fast-changing customer needs and how to best satisfy those needs in volatile markets will separate successful companies from their peers. In 2015, the business intelligence (BI) market will continue to be volatile, but it won’t stop BI technologies from becoming a critical component of firms’ business technology agenda.

Surprisingly, mobile BI’s potential will remain under-exploited. Today, only half of firms are using or piloting mobile BI solutions. And mobile BI adoption will become more polarized: We’ll see companies that understand the potential and are focusing to exploit it further, those that don’t see what’s in it for them, and those whose mobile BI deployment hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Whereas mobile BI adoption will be fragmented, cloud BI will not. When it comes to adoption, 34% of firms are already using software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, while an additional 31% are planning to do so.

According to another predictions report on big data, Forrester writes that Hadoop-based repositories (data lakes) will become an integral element of BI infrastructure, and that advanced analytics will drive further platform integration. Forrester predicts that Hadoop will become an enterprise norm in 2015.

Other BI predictions include:

  • Managed BI self-service will continue to close the business and technology gap.
  • The best BI tools for the job will continue to trump enterprise standards.
  • Data wrangling will become a key feature in leading platforms. 

Learn more about the research here.