According to separate research by the Aberdeen Group, Forrester Research and Dresner Advisory services, Business Intelligence (BI) users, not just BI vendors, will be looking to bolster their Mobile BI capabilities in 2011.
Both BI vendors and users have begun to fully realize the profitability and potential that the emerging mobile platform offers. However, this trend seems to be driven by an underlying understanding. Both groups now seem to understand that Mobile BI will soon be a basic requirement – an assumed checklist item within any comprehensive reporting and analytics package. Mobile BI is set to be a standard feature, rather than a differentiator, or competitive talking point.
The Users: Enterprise Mobility on the up
A new Aberdeen Group report – Enterprise Mobility Management 2011: Mobility Becomes Core IT – says that enterprise mobility has moved from its infancy to become a focal point of corporate IT strategy.
The study, based on a survey of over 250 organizations between January and February 2011, said that “Best-in-Class” organizations who made mobile information and data management a priority, were more likely to be able to provide employees with secure remote data access and increase time to action through faster decision-making.
Defining “Best-in-Class”
The research report divides respondent organizations into three categories:
- Best-in-Class (Top 20% of aggregate performance scorers)
- Industry Average (Middle 50% of aggregate performance scorers)
- Laggard (Bottom 30% of aggregate performance scorers)
The Best-in-Class are distinguished from Industry Average and Laggard companies by four main performance criteria:
- Ability to provide employees with secure remote access to company information assets
- Ability to successfully recover and decommission lost or stolen mobile devices
- Ability to increase decision-making speed
- Ability to centrally manage mobile devices
Drivers
The report revealed the top pressures driving enterprise mobility programs as:
- Demand for greater productivity (58%)
- Demand for greater operational efficiency (38%)
- The increasing capabilities of mobile devices (27%)
Benefits of comprehensive employee mobile information access
The report identified several significant benefits of mature enterprise mobility, including:
- Pervasive remote employee access to company data assets: Best-in-Class organizations deliver 88% of employees secure remote data access, compared to 44% of Industry Average organizations and 10% of Laggards
- Reduced incidents of unrecovered or unsecured misplaced mobile devices: Best-in-Class organizations were unable to recover or decommission 3.4% of lost or stolen mobile devices, compared to 4.9% for Industry Average organizations, and 67% for Laggards
- Improved data security: Eighty-one percent of Best-in-Class organizations can lock mobile devices or wipe any stored data from the device, compared to 52% of Industry Average organizations, and 26% of Laggards
- Faster decision-making: Best-in-Class organizations experienced an 18% increase in the speed of decision-making, compared to a 15.5% increase for Industry Average organizations, and 5.7% for Laggards
The 2010 Aberdeen survey – Enterprise Mobility Management: Optimizing the Full Mobile Lifecycle – indicated that Best-in-Class organizations also:
- Experienced a total cost of ownership per mobile employee of $198, 23% lower than the Industry Average, and 68% lower than Laggard organizations
- Reduced the number of lost or stolen mobile devices by 7%, 2.7 times that achieved by Industry Average organizations, and more than 26 times that of Laggard organizations
All results were measured over a 12-month period.
The Vendors: Enterprise Mobility on the up
A new Forrester Research study – Mobile App Internet Recasts the Software and Services Landscape – says that the rapid growth of mobile internet applications, in conjunction with available platforms and devices, will dramatically impact the development of the BI industry. The report, based on a survey of over 2100 software decision-makers from across the USA and Europe, revealed that 41% of respondents viewed app building and implementation as a “critical priority”. Forrester analyst John McCarthy suggests that enterprise spending on application development and implementation could climb to $54.6 billion for the year 2015.
“The explosion of app innovation that started on the iPhone and then spread to Android devices and tablets will continue to drive tech industry innovation and have far-reaching pricing and go-to-market implications for software and services providers,” McCarthy writes in the report.
The move towards mobile data access saw the mobile application development and management market grow to a $200 million industry in 2010, with Forrester tipping it to reach $17 billion in 2015.
Dresner’s updated Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study confirms findings
Howard Dresner’s updated Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study confirms that both BI vendors and users are focusing more attention and research on enterprise mobility.
Users
The landmark report revealed that 11 percent of respondent organizations provide access to Mobile BI to over 40 percent of their workforce. The report indicated that this figure is set to rise sharply. Within 12 months, 18 percent of organizations said that over 40 percent of their workforce will have access to Mobile BI, with around 33 percent expecting to deliver Mobile BI to over 40 percent of their workforce within 24 months.
Respondents across the board said that they planned to increase the number of personnel with access to Mobile BI, and reflective of the transition to enterprise mobility, 97 percent of respondents said that 25 percent or more users would receive analytics exclusively on a mobile device by 2013.
Vendors
The Dresner report suggests that BI vendors also view Mobile BI and remote data delivery as a priority moving into 2011 and beyond, with more vendors listing Mobile BI as “critically” or “very” important to their BI development plans, compared to the same study in June. No vendors listed Mobile BI as “unimportant”. The repot also indicates that vendors intend to significantly boost spending on mobile development, with all respondents citing plans to increase the number of platforms and features supported by their Mobile BI module.