The future of business intelligence

Computerworld - Our call for predictions about the future of business intelligence yielded a bountiful crop.

In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year. -- Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.

Within three years, users will begin demanding near-real-time analysis relating to their business -- in the same fashion as they monitor stock quotes online today. Monthly and even daily reports won't be good enough. Business intelligence will be more focused on vertical industries and feature more predictive modeling instead of ad hoc queries. -- Thomas Chesbrough, executive vice president of Thazar, a Skywire Software company, Frisco, Texas

Like standards in manufacturing for product quality, "data certification" will become a critical standard in the next three years for ensuring that vendors, customers and suppliers who acquire and/or share third-party data can measure the quality of that data before it's purchased or used. With a formal methodology, published set of criteria and certification test, information purchasers will be able to analyze data for appropriateness -- and request discounts for any deficiencies. -- Frank Dravis, vice president of information quality, Firstlogic Inc., La Crosse, Wis.

In the next three years, companies (and their business managers) will become utterly dependent on real-time business information, in much the same way that people expect to get information from the Internet in one or two clicks. This instant "Internet experience" will create the new framework for business intelligence, but business processes will have to change to accommodate and exploit the real-time flows of business data. -- Nigel Stokes, CEO, DataMirror Corp., Toronto

Companies are drowning in terabytes of data. In order to exploit the growing ocean of data, businesses will focus their business-intelligence spending in the next three years on technologies that address the inefficiencies of the underlying data storage, rather than the already powerful analytic applications. -- Foster Hinshaw, chief technology officer, Netezza Corp., Framingham, Mass.

In the next two years, business-intelligence capabilities will become more democratized, with a far greater number of end users across the enterprise using the tools to get better visibility into the performance of their segment of the business. Think of it as executive dashboards for worker bees. -- Steve Molsberry, senior consultant, Stonebridge Technologies Inc., Dallas

Business-intelligence data is what allows a company to grow and exploit future opportunities and, as such, is the target for corporate espionage, computer