Trends Report

Business Intelligence (BI) Polishes Its Crystal Ball

IBM's SPSS Deal Nudges Analytics Industry Toward Deeper Predictive Focus

August 18th, 2009
Boris Evelson, Vice President, Principal Analyst
Boris Evelson Vice President, Principal Analyst
Leslie Owens, null
Leslie Owens
James Kobielus, null
James Kobielus
With contributors:
R "Ray" Wang , Holger Kisker, Ph.D. , Rob Karel

Summary

Enterprise strategic, tactical, and operational decision-makers want to understand past and present activity but also anticipate the future to avoid being blindsided by seemingly hidden events. How do companies build a competitive "crystal ball"? They use advanced analytics applications integrated into their business intelligence (BI) applications and enterprise data warehousing (EDW) platforms. Many enterprises deploy siloed traditional BI and advanced analytics environments through fragmented, departmental, and tactical initiatives. In addition, vendors typically offer spotty or nonexistent integration among advanced analytics and BI solutions. But large BI vendors are pulling together deeper advanced analytics strategies — a trend strongly confirmed by IBM's recently announced plan to acquire SPSS. Forrester believes this strategic trend will continue, and will benefit business process and application (BP&A) and information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals seeking to build integrated traditional and advanced (predictive) BI applications.

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