Big Data’s Six Ingredients for Better BI

Big data and BI are critical, so the right tool for understanding that data is essential.

These days, it is easier than ever to collect all sorts of information. Details on the way customers are using your products, the effectiveness and reach of your marketing and sales campaigns, and other essential information are constantly being tracked, recorded, and stored in various data centers and cloud services across your organization.

In spite of the relative ease of gathering and accessing this data, turning that information into actionable insight remains a challenge. But, according to Forrester, change is coming. In their Predictions 2015 brief, Forrester laid out what to expect in 2015. The big story? Big data technologies will revolutionize business intelligence (BI) in these 6 ways:

1. Databases built for big data analytics will continue to supplement relational DBs
2. Big data exploration will continue to be part of BI
3. Hadoop-based data hubs will become essential to BI infrastructure
4. BI and advanced analytics will become inseparable
5. Bi is becoming embedded with more capabilities
6. Location and mapping for BI will continue to gain traction

Stop the Data Prep Drudgery

As application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals increasingly rely on BI for customer insights, Forrester predicts they will need to close the gap between the data that's available and the ability to turn that data into insight.

The problem lies in the way data is stored. Every application has its own data silo, whether it is a CRM application like Salesforce.com, a marketing automation platform like Marketo, or some other on-premise or cloud data source. To get a full picture of this data, all these various data sources must be combined with on-premise sources, cleaned and prepared for reporting. In the past, this has been a manual and highly tedious task, but that is about to change.

The Right Tools Matter

As Forrester claims in the report, the answer to BI woes lies in big data technology, and big data is rising to the challenge. Powerful data analysis and reporting tools like Tableau are now ubiquitous for BI. On the horizon, new technology is addressing the challenge of data preparation still present with those reporting tools. Progress Easyl is one such product which connects, combines, and cleans all your data from all your sources so you can collaborate and share it more easily.

Data preparation with Easyl improves reporting and analytics by leaps and bounds, throwing out the old, tedious method of preparing data by hand in favor of a simple interface with customizable templates, scheduling, and sharing features. This means you can access your data, create reports and get insights faster than ever.

For more details around this discussion, you can read the full Forrester report here.

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