Analytics Enters Mainstream

November 15, 2011 – Among hot BI and data management trends, business analytics is becoming mainstream and cloud computing is expected to take a big leap in adoption over the at once two years, according to a new international survey from IBM.

The 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report centered on plans over the straightway 24 months with business analytics, mobile, cloud and social business. Through IBM’s IT community and training site, developerWorks, more than 4,000 IT professionals across 25 industries contributed opinions for the survey, with the largest number of responses coming from the U.S., Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Business analytics carried the highest adoption tendency compared with other research areas, and half of those not currently using an analytics plan expected to do so over the at once 24 months, according to the report. Forty-two percent of respondents noted that business analytics is a focus area for software development, and, in another question, 87 percent of IT professionals stated open source platforms like Apache Hadoop and Linux are integral in that development.

The hype surrounding cloud computing

For all of the hype surrounding cloud computing, 40 percent of IT professionals in the survey said their organization is not presently engaged in the cloud. But, over the then and there 24 months, 75 percent of all respondents believe their organizations will start to build cloud infrastructure, surpassing plans and investment in areas of virtualization and storage, according to the survey. In a survey question that allowed multiple selections, plans for cloud implementation were led by the following: develop new applications for the cloud; virtualization; storage; private cloud; extend existing applications to the cloud; and hosted applications.

There was crossover from the cloud into another area explored in the survey, mobile computing, as 51 percent of respondents cited adoption of the cloud was part of their mobile strategy. Overall, 85 percent of respondents are or expect to work via mobile capabilities within the then 24 months, with enterprise apps and industry-specific apps as the top two adoption areas with mobile research, the survey stated.

The embrace of social business functionality comes with reservations, as 48 percent of respondents cited "adoption by employee and/or customer" as a point of business-side concern. Social business adoption is as well regional, as India leads the way with 57 percent use of internal or external social interfaces, or even mass market social networks, followed by the U.S., China and Russia.

Jim Corgel, general manager ISV and developer relations at IBM, said in a news release that the survey results show four business research avenues that have "gone beyond niche status and are now part of any modern organization’s core IT focus."

James Kobielus, The Forrester Muse Don’t fool yourselves into thinking data scientists live in ivory towers; far more work in the business world than in the halls of academe or think tanks. Data scientists can prove to be one of your most strategic assets in the competitive wars