Range of native applications key for effective Mobile Business Intelligence

According to Howard Dresner’s updated Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, to achieve an effective and widespread Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) rollout, organizations should look to vendors that offer native applications across a range of mobile platforms.

The study, officially released Wednesday February 17 in a live InformationWeek webcast, ranked BI vendor’s mobile capabilities according to the number of mobile platforms supported, the level of platform integration and the number of BI features supported.

Native applications for Mobile BI best: Dresner

Dresner explained, in the live InformationWeek webcast launch of the report, that the ability to support a range of mobile devices natively was a considerable advantage, and formed a good guide for assessing the level of functionality offered by vendor applications.

“Vendors got extra points for native applications – having an application on the device,” said Dresner, report author, former Gartner Research Fellow and President and Founder of Dresner Advisory Services. “It’s intended to indicate which vendors have sufficient Mobile Business Intelligence functionality.”

Dresner states in the report that native SDK integration remains the best approach to application development because it supports “a more interactive and dynamic experience for users… SDK is a preferred approach when seeking optimal usability.”

The report indicated that most BI vendors continue to deliver BI via a Web browser (HTML) model due to the comparative ease of development. The study shows that use of SDKs has increased for the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry applications since the original study in June 2010, and that many vendors also plan to offer native SDK integration for the iPhone, iPad and Android tablet within the next 12 months.

Best practice Mobile BI supports multiple platforms

Dresner said that whilst organizations should consider a raft of issues when selecting a BI solution to support a mobile communications network, the ability to support multiple platforms was a key factor.

“Business Intelligence vendors will have to support multiple mobile platforms, because the reality is, organizations have many of them [mobile devices] and they’re going to be around for a while,” said Dresner.

“There are lots of different devices out there, and it’s very difficult for them to standardize and [organizations] want to make sure that they get the full value of the investment that they’ve made. Whether it’s… an Apple device or an Android device, you shouldn’t have to standardize on a platform. You may choose to, but you shouldn’t have to as it relates to a Business Intelligence solution.”

Conclusion: Yellowfin’s making Mobile BI easy, naturally (no matter the platform)

Yellowfin’s Mobile BI module scored the second highest in the updated Dresner study, achieving 14 points out of a possible 20. The highest score achieved was 15 – no vendor scored 20 out of 20.

Why did we score so well? Yellowfin achieved the high ranking because we have multiple applications – for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms – which are all native, supporting total device independence.

Users can simply log into their existing Yellowfin account and gain instant access to their report content – there’s no need to re-create content for the mobile platform, or repackage it for mobile distribution.

Users can access and interact with their business data whenever they need to, the same as they would from their desktop, back in the office. Users can filter results, drill down and through data, comment on and email reports to make critical business decision in real-time.

Yellowfin is making Business Intelligence across multiple platforms easy and interactive; naturally.