Year in Review: Assessing Our Crystal Ball

With a slew of natural and man-made calamities, 2016 was the worst ever, according to many people. But for the Eckerson Group, last year was busier than ever. The rate of innovation in business analytics and data management has continued to accelerate, keeping us running fast to stay ahead of new trends, technologies, and products. The acceleration now forms the basis of many of our predictions for 2017. (See “Eckerson Group Predictions for 2017.”)

Wayne’s Predictions from 2016 – How Did I Do? 

In general, 2016 will be remembered as the year when the pendulum swung back from unfettered self-service to a more governed approach that balances speed and standards, avoiding data silos without overly restricting business user access to data and reports.

Of course, that’s easy to say in hindsight. What’s harder is trying to predict what will happen. In that spirit, it might be instructive to review what we thought would happen during 2016 and gauge the accuracy of our innate crystal ball. So, here are our predictions from 12 months ago and how we would rate their accuracy:

  • BI tools lose their desktops. BECOMING TRUE. Sure, desktop visualization tools, such as Tableau Desktop, are still selling well, but the longer-term trend is toward thin clients and cloud deployments. Even Tableau recognizes this and is promoting its server and cloud products prominently.
  • The cloud reaches a tipping point. ALMOST TRUE. A recent report by BARC and Eckerson Group shows that adoption of cloud BI for the first time in six years has moved above 30% to 43% now. And given the commitment to the cloud by the top software vendors—Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP—adoption of cloud BI is likely to accelerate.
  • BI add-ons become standard. MOSTLY TRUE. Last year saw the rise of the modern analytic platform—a full-stack BI platform with an open, integrated architecture that meets the needs of all users and developers, except perhaps data scientists.  A modern analytic platform is designed from the ground up to run on the Web, cloud, and mobile deployment platforms and support any type of data source and data.
  • The data lake gets management tools. TRUE. Recognizing that data lakes are fast becoming data swamps, many software vendors have stepped into the quagmire, releasing software that designs manages, tracks, tags, and secures the flow of big data from source to target. Startups, such as Podium Data and Zaloni, along with traditional data integration vendors, now offer solutions. Eckerson Group discussed data pipelining software in a recent report titled “Big Data Management Software for the Data-Driven Enterprise.
  • Data analysts discover data catalogs. TRUE. Data catalogs were the hot new product in 2016, promising to help data scientists and data analysts find, profile, and use relevant data sets and then leave breadcrumbs behind in the form of comments, tags, and likes to help colleagues. Eckerson Group provides insights into the role and functionality of data catalogs in a recent report.

So all in all, I did pretty well. Two “True’s”, one “Becoming True”, one “Almost True” and one “Mostly True”. It’s easier to predict when something new will get noticed than when something new will get implemented.

What Did I Miss? 

That being said, I missed a bunch of things, too. That’s mostly because I didn’t want to spray my readers with dozen of predictions, hoping one or two would come to fruition. So I chose the top five. In hindsight, however, I could have mentioned many other items and scored just as well. Here is a list of major happenings in 2016 that I didn’t warn you about!!

  • Governed Self Service. I spent so much time writing and talking about this topic in 2016 that I’m bewildered why I didn’t add it to the list. I published a report on Governed Data Discovery last February and another on Self-Service Analytics in September.
  • Embedded BI. I also wrote two reports on this topic last year, one titled “Embedded Analytics: The Future of BI” and another “Which Embedded BI Product is Right for You”.  It turns out that embedded BI generates a third to half of many BI vendors’ revenue.
  • Data Preparation. Data preparation wasn’t entirely new in 2016, but its crescendo grew significantly last year, dwarfing all other data management topics. We positioned data prep tools in our report, titled “Data Lake Management Software for a Data-Driven Enterprise.”
  • Citizen Data Integrators. First, we had self-service reporting, then self-service data preparation, and now Citizen Data Integrators, who are business people who set up simple data integration tasks without coding. We touched on this topic in the report, “Making Integration Pervasive: The Rise of Cloud Integration Platforms.”
  • Citizens Data Scientist. Not to be outdone, the industry began touting self-service predictive analytics tools that enable business users to create analytic models. We’ll tackle this topic in Steve Smith’s upcoming report titled, “The Citizen Data Scientists: Techniques for Simplifying and Automating Data Science”.
  • Streaming Analytics. Go to a Strata or Hadoop conference and it’s seemingly dominated by streaming analytics vendors. And it makes sense—if you have big data or the internet of things, you’ll need to stream data rather than batch load it into a data lake or data warehouse.  
  • Artificial Intelligence. What used to be called data mining, then predictive analytics, then machine learning, is now called artificial intelligence—a very old term and technology. What goes around comes around. This started spiking this fall and is poised to skyrocket in 2017.

In 12 months, we’ll reassess our picks from this year and tell you how we did!

Wayne Eckerson

Wayne Eckerson is an internationally recognized thought leader in the business intelligence and analytics field. He is a sought-after consultant and noted speaker who thinks critically, writes clearly and presents...

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