Mobile Analytics - A Game Changer!

Mobile Analytics (a.ka. Mobile BI) has been the hottest strategic topic and a top focus for many enterprise software organizations as customers, small and large, grapple with the big data onslaught and throw everything at it to become even more efficient, both on top-line growth and bottom-line optimization, in an economy struggling to grow and a continent unable to stop a contagion from spreading and once again threatening the global economy.  

Customer's perennial struggle and in-turn a cost-saving approach translates into big analytics opportunity for enterprise software companies to shift customers from traditional analytics solutions to Mobile and Cloud based analytics solutions.

On the premise explained above, I did a business case about 9 months ago to develop a FULL picture of Mobile Analytics market.  I used a ton of research and analyst reports and interviews and invested upwards of hundreds of hours to develop and present a complete story on Mobile Analytics including developing my own proprietary models related to assessing the size of this opportunity. 

I am summarizing my findings at a very high level in following bullet points and have made available the synthesis slides on slideshare (link is printed below).

• Big Data - According to IDC, data is doubling every two years and is expected to reach 1.8 ZB (a trillion GB) in 2011.
• Eight mobility related mega trends are locked in a virtuous cycle and will be the bedrock for growth and adoption of Mobile BI solutions and for  the overall Enterprise Mobility.
• Mobile BI market could grow at 20% plus CAGR over the next 5 years and could likely become over a $2 billion market by 2015.
• According to Gartner, more than 33% of Analytics will be consumed using mobile devices, a prediction well supported by the 8 mobility related mega trends discussed here.
• Therefore, by 2015 more than 15% of Analytics revenues could come from Mobile Analytics solutions. This should be a serious strategic priority for every Analytics vendor if not already.
• Advanced Analytics including geo-spatial for  Mobile Consumers is growing as computing power and form factor of mobile devices change rapidly. 
• Shift to “active production model” from a “passive consumption model”  is expected to happen allowing mobile business users to assemble dashboards and produce/edit reports on the go.

Download slides from Slideshrae - Mobile Analytics (Mobile BI) - A Game Changer

Special thanks goes to Gartner, IDC, Boris Evelson of Forrester, Cindy Howson of BI Scorecard, and Howard Dresner of Dresner Advisory Services for producing excellent research on this topic and answering all my questions and to all my colleagues and friends across the world. 

Upcoming blog on Agile Analytics

Does your company have a BI implementation plan? Consider this statistics:

• According to market research firm IDC, annual data generation will reach 35 zettabytes or about 35 million petabytes by 2020. 
• That is enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars, or 17.5 million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States. 
• As a result, business intelligence has become an eight billion dollar industry and continues to increase each year. Global Industry Analysts released a report in July projecting the BI software market will reach $12.4 billion by 2015.
•  In May, Forrester came out with a report on the state of the BI industry, finding 49 percent of companies are planning a BI project in 2010 or soon after.

I think that the BI market is expected to be bigger than what IDC is projecting based on my own experience, analysis, research trends and continuous work with BI think-tanks. There are lot of other trends like location analytics and predictive which will make BI even more pervasive in next 2-3 years. 

Now, this ties pretty neatly into my earlier blogs on Big Data and huge amount of innovation happening in this space. Keep blogging... (See my blog entry from February 2010)