Exploring The Future of Business Intelligence Applications

an Enterprise Applications eBook
Exploring
the Future
of Business Intelligence
Applications
2 Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and
Data Virtualization
6 Business Intelligence Challenged by Social, Mobile Data
9 Rethinking Mobile Business Intelligence
12 HTML5 Will Transform Mobile Business Intelligence
and CRM
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9
Contents
This content is adapted from the Enterprise Apps Today website.
Contributors: Wayne Kernochan and Drew Robb.
Exploring the Future of Business
Intelligence Applications
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12
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Exploring the Future of Business Intelligence Applications a QuinStreet Enterprise Applications eBook. 2013 QuinStreet, Inc.
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ne of the most fundamental decisions
that business intelligence implementers
in IT make, at the beginning of every
new BI initiative, is whether the new
data involved should be copied into a central data
mart or data warehouse or accessed where it is.
The advent of software as a service (SaaS) and the
public cloud has added a new dimension to this
decision: Now the BI implementer must also decide
whether to move the data physically into the cloud
and de-link the cloud and internal data stores. In
fact, this decision is no longer the purview solely of the
CTO the security concerns when you move data to a
public service provider mean that corporate needs to
have input into the decision. However, fundamentally,
the decision is the same: Move the one copy of the
data; keep the one copy where it is; or copy the data,
move one copy and synchronize between copies.
Almost two decades of experience with data
warehousing has shown that these decisions have serious
long-term consequences. On the one hand, for customer
buying-pattern insights that demand a petabyte of
related data, failure to copy to a central location can
mean serious performance degradation as in, it
takes hours instead of minutes to detect a major cross-
geography shift in buying behavior. On the other hand,
attempting to stuff Big Data like the graphics and video
involved in social networking into a data warehouse
means an exceptionally long lag time before the data
yields insights. The frms existing data warehouse
wasnt designed for this data; it is not fne-tuned for
good performance on this data; and despite the best
efforts of vendors, periodic movement or replication of
such massive amounts of data to the data warehouse
has a large impact on the data warehouses ability to
Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing
and Data Virtualization
By Wayne Kernochan
O
perform its usual tasks. Above all, these consequences
are long-term applications are written that depend
for their performance on the existing location of the
data, and redoing all of these applications if you want
to move to a different database engine or a different
location is beyond the powers of most IT shops.
The reason that it is time to revisit the move or stay
decision now is that business intelligence users, and
therefore the BI IT that supports them, are faced with
an unprecedented opportunity and an unprecedented
problem. The opportunity, which now as never before is
available not only to large but also medium-sized frms,
is to gather mammoth amounts of new customer data
on the Web and use rapid-fre BI on that data to drive
faster customer-of-one and agile product development
and sales. The problem is that much of this new data
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is large (by some estimates, even unstructured data
inside the organization is approaching 90 percent of
organizational data by size), is generated outside the
organization, and changes very rapidly due to rapid and
dangerous changes in the companys environment: fads,
sudden brand-impacting environmental concerns, and/or
competitors who are playing the same BI game as you.
How do you get performance without moving the data
into the organizations data warehouse? How can the
data warehouse support both new and old types of data
and deliver performance on both? Most importantly, how
do you keep from making the same mistakes in move or
stay decisions that make present-day data warehousing
so expensive and sub-optimal for your new needs?
Business Intelligence Political Wars
Todays business intelligence users, wowed by case
studies of great analytics insights leading to major cost-
cutting and add-on sales, are likely to view these move
or stay decisions as the property of IT, to be decided
after the CEO or CMO decides how best to use the
latest dashboard, Facebook data miner or performance
management tool. In turn, BI IT has tended to view
these decisions as more short-term and ad-hoc, meant
to meet immediate urgent needs. Alas, past experience
has shown that not only is such an approach to business
intelligence implementation unwise, it is also futile.
An old story is of the new pastor, some of whose
congregation ask him to change the location of the altar.
He asks an older pastor what the tradition is, and the
pastor, instead of answering, says to try it that way. The
result is a massive argument among the congregation.
He goes back, and the older pastor says to put it
back. Instead of dying down, the argument gets even
hotter. He goes back again, and says, whats the
tradition? My congregation is fghting like mad about
this. Ah, says the older pastor, thats the tradition.
In the same way, when data warehousing was frst
introduced, CEOs deferred the move or stay decision
to IT, which attempted to shoehorn all data into the
central data warehouse. Lines of business, of course,
resisted the idea that corporate IT should be gatekeepers
over their data, making them wait for weeks for reports
on their local sales that used to take a day. The result
was that CEOs were being frequently appealed to by IT
or by lines of business over the matter that became
the tradition. Eventually, the advent of data marts and
the fact on the ground that data warehouses could not
handle new data from acquisitions ended the arguments,
at the cost of BI that was poorly equipped to handle
new data from outside the organization and executives
and lines of business that under-used corporate BI.
To avoid these political wars, the BI user needs to set
out a long-term approach to move or stay that should
inform implementation decisions at both the corporate
and IT level. Instead of I have a hammer, everything looks
like a nail, this approach stresses maximum fexibility
and agility of any BI solution which, in turn, translates
to asking BI IT to deliver, not the highest performance,
but reasonable performance and maximum architectural
fexibility to accommodate new types of data.
The Business Intelligence Technology of the
Decade
To make such an approach effective, the BI-using
enterprise needs to understand just what IT can
and cannot do to make the architecture fexible
by move or stay decisions.Here, the good news
The BI user needs to set out a long-term approach
to move or stay that should inform implementation
decisions at both the corporate and IT level.
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is that software technology developed over the
last decade has given IT a lot more ability to make
their architectures fexible if they will use it.
In my view, the greatest business intelligence technology
advance of the last decade is not cloud, analytics, BI
for the masses, or near-real-time BI, but a technology
originally called Enterprise Information Integration (EII)
and now called data virtualization. This technology
makes many disparate data stores appear as one to the
user, developer and administrator.In order to do so, it
also demands that the data virtualization user develop
a global metadata directory that catalogs not only data
copies, but also variant storage formats. Thus, in master
data management, data virtualization allows a wide
variety of ways of representing a customer, many of them
from acquired companies with their own approaches
to customer data, to have a common master record.
In business intelligence, data virtualization allows Big
Data from outside the organization to be combined with
new types of operational data that are not yet stored in
the data warehouse and with data-warehouse data in
carrying out near-real-time data mining and analytics.
The practical effect of data virtualization is that in the real
world it delivers the move or stay fexibility that data
warehousing alone never could. It does this in two ways:
1. It gives the BI end user a third option: not just
copy new data to the data warehouse and wait
until the data warehouse allows you access
to it or dont copy it and have no access to
it, but you also have the option not to copy it
and have slower-performance access to it.
2. It makes IT and the organization aware of its
data assets, allowing IT to provide high-level BI
interfaces below which the datas location can be
changed as needed, and allowing the organization
to understand better the BI opportunities
afforded by new data they hadnt known about.
There are data virtualization products available
today, as well as master data management solutions
embeddable in the products of business intelligence
vendors. At the same time, BI buyers should bear
in mind that a Metadata Offcer to abet storage of
metadata information in the repository and enforce
corporate standards for master data management is
needed and is a good idea in the long run anyway.
The second advance that BI users should know about
is a work in progress, and is also a bit trickier to
describe. The essence of the problem with scattering
data copies across geographies is that either you have
to make it so that every time one copy of the data is
updated, it appears to the user as if all other copies are
updated simultaneously, or you have to deal with the
diffculties that result when one user thinks the data
has one value, and the other, another. For example,
suppose your bank receives a deposit to your checking
account in New York to cover a withdrawal, and the
withdrawal itself in Shanghai immediately after. If
the Shanghai branch doesnt receive the notifcation
of the frst update in time, you will face overdraft
fees and will be rightfully annoyed at the bank.
For at least the last thirty years, software folks have been
wrestling with this problem. The solution that covers all
cases is something called the two-phase commit, but it
requires two back-and-forth communications between
New York and Shanghai, and is therefore so slow in
real life that it can only handle a small percentage of
todays data. In the late 1990s, Microsoft and others
found a way to delay some of the updates and still
make it look like all the data is in synchronization in
the local area networks that support todays global
organizations. Above all, over the last few years, the
need to support distributed cloud data stores has led to
identifcation of many use cases (often associated with
the noSQL movement) in which two-phase commit
isnt needed and so-called eventual consistency
is OK. The result is that, on the cloud, you are much
more able to keep multiple copies of data in different
locations without slowing down business intelligence
performance unacceptably. Of course, this is still a long
ways from the cloud hype of your data is somewhere
in the cloud, and you dont need to know the location
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and it is likely that in the real world we will never get
to the point where data location doesnt matter.
Thus, the business intelligence-using organization should
expect IT to be able to use data virtualization to deliver
much greater BI fexibility, in the cloud or outside it, and
should demand that IT consider the fexibility benefts
of noSQL-type data copying in certain use cases but
should not expect cloud data-location nirvana.
The Business Intelligence User Bottom Line:
Think Long Term
So move or stay is an important decision for the
business intelligence buyer or upgrader; it should be
made up front by corporate as well as IT; there are much
better solutions today that allow smart BI implementers
to avoid many past mistakes; and the key to move or
stay decision success is to emphasize fexibility over
raw performance. Suppose you do all that; now what?
The frst thing you fnd is that decisions like cloud BI or
not cloud BI become a lot easier. With less dependence
on data-location-dependent apps, moving these apps
and their data from location to location becomes, if not
easy, at least doable in a lot more cases. So where now
it makes sense to move only a small subset of mission-
critical Big Data to a small cloud BI provider, because
otherwise the coordination between that and your data
warehouse becomes unwieldy, now you can make the
decision based more on potential cost savings from the
cloud vs. the overall performance advantages (smaller
than before) of a single massive data warehouse.
The second thing you discover is that you have
created some new problems but also some new
opportunities. The old, dying data warehouse plus
operational database model of handling enterprise
data had its drawbacks; but compared to the new
architectures, complexity was not one of them.
However, well-designed new architectures that include
moved, copied, and accessed-in-place data also allow
the BI user to constantly change the proportions
rapidly to adapt to new data. In this case, the agility
benefts far outweigh the complexity costs.
The third thing you see is that corporate is being
forced to think about BI as a long-term investment,
not an endless series of fad tools and thats an
excellent thing. All too often, today, the market for
BI in general and analytics in particular is driven by
one-time cost-cutting or immediate needs for insights
and rapid decisions. The key difference between
organization fexibility and organizational agility is that
the latter makes the organization constantly change,
because it is always focused on the change after this
one. Move or stay decisions by IT can make your
business intelligence and enterprise architecture more
fexible; a long-term mindset by corporate that drives
the move or stay and other BI decisions makes BI and
the whole organization more agile. And data on agile
software development suggests that agility delivers
greater cost, revenue, and customer satisfaction benefts
than fexibility, both in the short and long term.
A fnal thought: a popular term a few years ago was
glocal, in which the most effective enterprise was the
one that best combined global and local insights. Move
or stay is the equivalent in business intelligence, a way of
tuning BI to combine the best of internal/local and Web/
cloud/global data for better insights. In essence, move
or stay success is a way to achieve information glocality.
Given the importance today of long-term, customer-
information-driven competitive advantage, a key action
item for every business inteligence user, in corporate
and IT, should be to redesign the BI architecture in
accordance with more agile move or stay norms.
Its not administrivia; its about the long term.
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2010 IBM survey found that 76 percent of
CEOs view insight and intelligence as
key to corporate success over the next fve
years slightly behind getting close to the
customer and people skills and that, in response,
83 percent of CIOs correctly perceive that leveraging
business intelligence (BI) is the
best way to implement these
strategies.
But whats the best way to
leverage BI? A recent Gartner
report, fawed or not, suggests
that many business intelligence
projects fail, or are perceived
as doing so. And the risks of
failure, and consequences of
success, are not negligible:
another IBM study indicates
that improving business agility
by such strategies as agile
BI can lead to long-term
improvements in top- and
bottom-line business metrics
by as much as 60 percent.
How do successful BI implementers operate? A recent
MIT study suggests that they create and maintain a data-
driven decision process. In other words, best-in-class
BI implementers consciously view their organizations
as machines that scoop up information and funnel it
to decision-makers, and so they design a machine that
will carry out such a process as quickly as possible,
with as little information loss as possible, and with the
right networks to aim each piece of information at the
right decision-maker. To support this machine, they buy
software and hardware that will not only process fast and
accurately, but also have the smarts to fgure out who can
use the information best, and pre-analyze for the target
decision-maker.
Now, however, this beautiful model of how to operate,
developed over the last 20 years and well served by
existing business intelligence
frms, may be breaking down.
The problem is that much of
the valuable information about
a frms customers, suppliers
and environment exists
outside the frm but is not
being captured by the existing
machine and more new types
of information are arriving out
there, faster and faster. The
Other Category of information,
not handled by existing data
warehouses, is now beginning
to determine corporate
customer relationships social
information as in Facebook,
sensor information as in
Google Maps, smartphone information as in cellphone
videos and snapshots, or rapid-fre text conversations
via tweets and texting.How should IT buyers keep the
machine from breaking down as its asked to handle
information it was never designed for, or, even worse,
churning away at information that is less and less relevant
to the needs of the frm?
It is hard to fnd an answer among the clouds of cloud
BI hype, the fashbulbs of BI vendor hype and the
distractions of hot-topic hype. But I believe that certain
principles will serve the best-in-class BI buyer well, now
and in the future.
Business Intelligence Challenged
by Social, Mobile Data
By Wayne Kernochan
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A Modest Other Proposal for Business
Intelligence
I would propose three additional criteria for the BI buyer
who has exhausted the usual criteria of ft to purpose,
scalability, robustness, fexibility and conformance to
government and business requirements. The frst is:
more truly agile is better than less truly agile. That is, a
BI solution that helps the frm make itself not only faster
to respond to the customer but also more effective in
anticipating customer changes is to be preferred.
An example might be the whole hot topic of agile
business intelligence that I have discussed in the past.
As others have noted, some frms try to do agile on the
cheap by setting loose programmers with any kind of so-
called agile development process to constantly customize
the vendors existing or latest BI solution. Others
seek to complement existing BI solutions with agile
development, constantly involving customer input and
vendor advice, with the responsibility shifting from the
vendor to the frm as IT gains experience. Commentators
have noted that this kind of approach tends to work out
better, and that vendors who can support agile advice
and responsibility shifting are to be preferred.
The second criterion is: third-party is better than one-
stop lock-in. I dont mean that you shouldnt buy from
a BI vendor that can supply everything you need in-
house.No, what Im talking about is the likely result in
your architecture of adopting the BI vendor, and the
attitude of the vendor. Will your choice of a vendors
solution component foreclose some other databases (say,
noSQL databases), or does your vendor try to use the
sale to crowd out all other vendors in a particular area,
as, say, Oracle has been accused of doing in databases
in the past? The ability of the vendor to handle todays
Other Category data (e.g., unstructured and semi-
structured Web Big Data) and integrate with the Web
sources supplying that data and the open-source tools
that can also provide access to that data is a good test
of whether the vendor is open to present and future third
parties.
And fnally, my third criterion would be: How well does
the vendor handle the other other category? Because
the fact is that there will always be an important other
category of information that you will need to seek out,
no matter how much of it you cover today. Necessarily,
todays business intelligence solutions, having focused
on structured data, will focus only on certain parts of
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todays Other information social media, Hadoop
that are easier to aggregate, and more important right
now. For example, IBMs present defnition of Big Data
provides a separate Big Data platform, but that platform
draws its information most easily from such sources as
geospatial and Facebook data stores, not smartphone
texting. A vendor who supports open-ended tools such
as agile development environments, data integration
with unstructured data support, and BI-driven CRM is
more likely to allow you to evolve your BI as new types of
information arise and become important.
IT Buyer Bottom Line: Let the Customer Hug
You Back
The most popular current CEO strategy getting close
to the customer often seems to the BI implementer to
mean hug the customer more closely: respond more
quickly to new information from the customer, analyze it
better so as to understand the customer, and ensure a
longer and longer relationship involving more and more
add-on sales. But the importance of todays Other
Category to business success indicates that there is
another side to the customer relationship: following the
customer as the customers needs and wants change over
time. That, after all, is why the Other Category arose in
the frst place because the advent of the Web provided
a new, faster-changing customer environment that
outdated the business data warehouse model.
Thus, the IT buyer cannot assume that simply
implementing a Big Data platform, or a series of cloud
BI projects, will be a long-run best practice. Instead, the
IT buyer should attempt to assure, by adding my three
criteria or in some other way that future Other Categories
will be handled better.
The same surveys that show CEOs ideas of successful
business strategies also show that they view the
environment of the business, not the business itself,
as the source of the greatest business risk because it
keeps changing faster and faster. As it does, customer
needs and wants will inevitably do so as well, and
probably faster and faster. Your business intelligence
that analyzes these needs and wants must be open to
the customers indication of those changes which often
show up as information in an Other Category. And if you
want to hug the customer closer, you need to ensure that
the customers changes result in the customer fnding you
to be an even better ft for purpose, and thus hugging
you better. To do this, pick business intelligence solutions
that will continue to handle the Other Categories of the
future. Your customers may well hug you for it.
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assumptions implicit in todays vendor visions of mobile
BI. In particular, we need to shed the assumption of one-
size-fts-all mobile hardware.
Death of the Laptop Exaggerated
The basic approach of many mobile BI vendors and IT
users today refects a sense that the mobile workers
future all-purpose mobile computing device will be
the smartphone. After all, its consumer installed base
is far greater than that of the PC, it is used for other
sophisticated apps like performing transactions in bank
accounts or (in Europe) waving the cell phone in front of
a sensor to pay for purchases, and some predictions are
that laptop sales will start to decline, while smartphone
purchases continue a steep rise. If there is any future
competitor, the conventional wisdom asserts, it is the
Rethinking Mobile Business Intelligence
By Wayne Kernochan
As if the advent of agile business
intelligence wasnt enough of a
puzzle, IT buyers are now being asked
to wrap their minds around the notion
of mobile business intelligence. There are several
head-scratching features of mobile BI as it is
advertised today:
Todays hot analytics tools are all about
deeper, more ad-hoc analysis based on
data-stuffed enterprise reports, and foods of
just-in-time data alerting real-time enterprises
and driving more immediate decisions in
other words, lots of data with complicated
relationships. How do you ft all that on a
cell phone screen? How do you perform
complicated analyses without a keyboard?
Whats the target form factor? First
it seemed to be the iPhone, then the iPhone
plus iPad and now it appears to be a stew of
iPhone, Android, iPad and other approaches.
Whats the use case? Is it sales-type customer
interaction, with just-in-time price comparisons and
local inventory search? Is it global marketing, with
the executive travelling light and always in touch
with local markets and corporate fnancials? Is it the
manufacturing process, with supply-chain analytics in
the middle of the factory foor or the warehouse? Is it
glocality, with cheap cell-phone access driving thriving
developing-country offces? Whats the killer app?
I believe that there are straightforward answers to each of
the above questions that should improve an enterprises
implementation of mobile business intelligence. However,
to get to these answers we need to rethink some basic
W
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iPad, which presently has some limits on its ability to
perform enterprise apps and is larger (and therefore less
mobile).
However, research that looks more closely at how workers
are using mobile devices today paints a very different
picture. To handle their mobile needs, these workers
employ what I call a three-legged stool:
For wandering around in the immediate
area, such as around the offce or factory foor,
mobile workers use smartphones, because they
are light, dont require placement on an object
for use, and can use the Internet constantly in
pretty much any area via cell phone networks.
For moving around locally and then fnding a stable
site to work from, a netbook (and now possibly
an iPad) is preferred. They can be carried for long
distances (say, in a bag), they have larger screens
for more complicated output, and netbooks have
keyboards for complicated input. By tethering
a cell phone or getting a special attachment, the
netbook user can get the same access to the Internet
as a smartphone. At present, the netbook lacks the
touch screen capabilities of the iPhone and iPad,
but there are indications that within a year both
hardware and operating system (Windows 8) vendors
will support touch screens in laptops and PCs.
For traveling beyond the local area, a full-fedged
laptop is preferred. Users view both the smartphone
and netbook as too crippled to do all of the
corporate tasks that they may want to do when
they are away from home for a long time. Again,
note that the keyboard is an important plus in these
cases, due to the use of legacy corporate user
interfaces, and tethering or attachments will yield
Internet access anywhere. In effect, the destination
of the travel becomes a new offce away from
offce, with a laptop replacing the PC and a
smartphone still used for wandering around locally.
In fact, it is possible to view todays mobile user
as creating a mobile mobile offce, where ones
traditional physical offce with its PC, extended
locally by the smartphone and netbook, can now
be mimicked halfway around the world. And
that, in turn, means that there will still be plenty
of demand for laptops in the near future.
Fine-Tuning Mobile Business Intelligence
This vision of a mobile mobile offce suggests some
answers to the questions I posed at the start of this
article. Lets take each of them in turn:
How do you ft BI on a cell phone screen? You dont. All
you need to support is the simple business intelligence
needed when one is wandering around in ones
immediate area do we have this in stock? Is there a
problem in the store? For those spare minutes where you
as a manager need to dig deeper, theres the netbook.
Whats the target form factor? For the immediate future,
it appears that mobile workers mobile mobile offce
will not change drastically. Long-distance travelers will
still want keyboards, and the smartphones advantages
of touch interfaces and ubiquitous Internet access are
vanishing. It is possible that extensions to the netbook
The basic approach of many mobile BI vendors
and IT users today refects a sense that the mobile
workers future all-purpose mobile computing device
will be the smartphone.
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will make it serve adequately as both an iPad and a full-
fedged laptop. Therefore, the mobile BI implementer
should consider targeting at least two and probably three
form factors (note the netbook/laptop typically already
has a fair amount of enterprise IT support). The cell
phone and laptop platforms have a ways to go to merge,
but via such offerings as Googles Android cell phone
OS and Chrome network computer OS, it is possible to
envision a one API to choke common platform across
the two, to which the implementer can port enterprise
business intelligence client software and mini-apps.
Whats the use case? In fact, with solutions for each type
of mobility, the answer is: all of the above. The sales call
is local; the manufacturing foor is immediate-area; the
long-distance traveler is a full-fedged mobile mobile
offce, and so is the developing-market physical offce.
And that, in turn, means that there is no single killer app
for mobile BI. All of the above use cases will beneft from
providing such a mobile extension to the existing BI
solution to the mobile worker.
The Mobile BI Bottom Line
The message of users employment of mobile technology
is that the way is now clear to providing a reasonable
equivalent to the key promised beneft of mobile
business intelligence in-depth, ad-hoc analysis of key
data, no matter where you are, moving or not. Rethink
mobile BI, tune the implementation plan to support the
three-legged stool I have cited above, and there is a clear
path to such a mobile BI solution.
That doesnt mean that implementing such a solution
will be easy. To cite just a few diffculties: you need to
minimize the costs and time of developing new apps for
multiple, disparate mobile platforms; you need to identify
the specifc use cases for each platform for your own
business; and you need to future-proof the platform, as
it is likely that one or more of the three platform types in
the three-legged stool will change signifcantly over the
next year or so, in predictable (Windows 8 touch screens)
and unpredictable (will Android succeed?) ways.
However, implementation diffculties should not be a
barrier to starting to create your three-legged stool
today. In fact, the fast pace of change in the mobile
market only makes a quick start more urgent. Remember,
the smartphone app market is consumer-driven, as is
your mobile technologys enterprise use. The more you
lag the market, the less able you are to support the
mobile data analytics that your companys consumers/
employees may well do with you or without you not to
mention without adequate corporate security.
And, best of all, with an adequate mobile BI plan in place,
you can go back to scratching your head about agile BI.
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HTML5 Will Transform
Mobile Business Intelligence and CRM
By Drew Robb
TML has evolved considerably since it
was frst mapped out by Tim Berners-
Lee more than 20 years ago. Now were
up to HTML 5.0, which could have a
signifcant effect on the business intelligence and
CRM landscape.
HTML5 is a big push forward, especially considering
how it handles different media as well as cross-device
portability, said Tiemo Winterkamp, senior vice
president of global marketing at business intelligence
(BI) vendor arcplan. Both are key areas to help us
with mobile scenarios.
In the past, browsers were dependent on other
technologies such as Flash, Silverlight or Java to
render rich Internet applications (RIAs). This created
problems such as Flash not being supported on
iPhones or iPads. One big beneft of HTML5 is that
browsers will be able to integrate additional content
like multimedia, mail and RIAs with enhanced rendering
capabilities. And plans have been made to allow future
HTML5 browsers to securely access sensor and touch
information, which makes HTML5 a viable alternative to
native application development for such functions.
The result: With HTML5, nearly every piece of Internet
content we can envision today will be able to be coded in
HTML, Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and
therefore automatically portable to all environments and
browsers supporting HTML5.
This approach is very attractive for BI vendors who
aim to provide business critical information anywhere,
anytime and on any device, said Winterkamp. The
result is an attractive, multi-functional user interface with
as little design and deployment effort as possible. And
more importantly, you only need to develop these apps
once for all devices.
He notes that HTML5 is very much a standard on the
rise. It is progressing fast, with supporters such as
Apple, Microsoft and Google, but the different browser
vendors are currently cherry-picking the HTML5 features
that best ft their current roadmap. Thus the degree
of HTML5 support varies within some browsers, and
an offcial release date when well see browsers with
a broad implementation is hard to predict. But the
good news for business applications is that many of the
features available today thanks to HTML5 are suffcient
to implement modern business intelligence and CRM
applications.
For standard PCs or notebooks, current HTML is fne in
terms of delivery of most relevant business intelligence and
H
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CRM functions. However, factors such as screen resolution
and device size make mobile devices more of a challenge.
HTML5 will simplify things and incorporate zooming
technologies and gestures (pinching, double tap, turning,
and so on) natively provided by the different devices.
The advent of HTML5 will also be good for app
development. It will act as an impetus for innovation
among CRM and BI application developers.
Improved browsing technologies will force apps to
evolve, said Thomas Husson, an analyst at Forrester
Research. In addition to talking to the local device, next-
level apps should also talk to other apps through open
APIs and interact with other devices.
Empowering Mobile Salespeople
Looking ahead, HTML5 will make it easier to bundle
various types of media content into one client mashup.
For example, it becomes possible to list the nearby
customers of a salesperson based on current GPS
information and further visualize the different locations
within Google Maps.
You could even go as deep as mashing up the current
total turnover of the customer with embedded chart
visualization, said Winterkamp. You may even embed
content such as voice comments, pictures or bar codes as
attachments in the database which is currently used on
the server side.
Yes, some current applications can do all of that. But
those are typically custom-built native apps that run on
a specifc device or platform. With the new HTML5, the
door is opened to the creation of such applications once
for them to be deployed everywhere.
Take the case of App Store tools that were specifcally
created for iPhones. When the iPad hit the streets, those
apps had to be adjusted to work on that platform. And
in many cases, they could not be reused for Android or
Blackberry devices. Each of the apps for these different
platforms and devices has to be maintained over time.
HTML5 simplifes takes away that complexity, reducing
the maintenance cost for mobile BI.
CRM, BI Vendors Roll Out HTML5 Apps
What is going to happen on the vendor front? More than
likely, the established CRM and business intelligence
players will be slower to adopt HTML5, as they already
have plenty on their plates to deal with maintaining and
upgrading their existing products. So look for the smaller
players to be the ground breakers in this arena.
Arcplan, for instance, completed a review of its mobile
BI options in 2010 and decided to go the web-app route
using HTML rather than harnessing native applications.
The result is that arcplan Mobile can run on any browser
providing suffcient HTML support. This includes WebKit-
based mobile browsers on iPhone, Blackberry, Android,
Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and Bada.
We are not offering every HTML5 function right now, but
with each update of arcplan Mobile, well integrate new
functions as they become available, said Winterkamp.
One thing that is high on our wish list is to have local and
secure data storage in the browsers. This will then allow
users to create uniform offine analytical web apps.
Another potential addition would be to have something
on a smartphone or tablet PC called a mobile BI Wall.
This could give users widget-like snippets of dashboards
and reports on their computers that are automatically
updated and fed by a BI data warehouse. Typically
this requires animated charts, local data storage,
personalization, and collaboration features.
Overall, it may be a little while before this technology
breaks into the business intelligence and CRM
mainstream.
HTML5 will greatly improve the audio and video
capabilities of mobile browsers, said Husson. However,
it will be at least three years before the technology fully
matures. It has to reach critical mass on consumers
mobile handsets and in developers minds.

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