A bit tired of all the 2009 predictions on the future of various emerging and existing integration and business intelligence technologies, I find recommendations for the new year much more useful. Why not? Get over speculating on what’s it gonna be like and make the future happen any way you want in terms of your own customer data.

Listening to what industry experts say in their latest reports would be a good place to start.

Loraine Lawson posted a brief review of two recent data integration papers: a report from DataMonitor and another one from the TDWI.

The Data Monitorreport lists inadequate data quality as the first and main obstacle to data supporting business processes, the second being poor understanding of the data lifecycle and associated metadata. It also provides recommendations, including revamped data-integration strategy, and adopting a comprehensive data strategy, which Lawson gave particularly emphasizes in her blog.

The second, TDWI report, “Customer Data Integration: Managing Customer Information as an Organizational Asset” that Lawson discussed in an earlier interview with TDWI analyst Philip Russom, emphasizes the importance of data integration to ERP and CRM and too provides a load of recommendations on how to get a positive ROI on your data integration initiatives.

You can find links to all reports in the original post over here.

Jeff Kelly from SearchDataManagement.com has gathered and posted various forecasts as to what awaits Business Intelligence industry in 2009. The analysts and experts sharing their predictions were: Wayne Eckerson, Director of research and services for the Data Warehousing Institute, James G. Kobielus, Senior analyst at Cambridge-based Forrester Research covering BI and data warehousing, and various analysts at Gartner Inc.

A few of my highlights from the article:

Open Source BI will gain even more popularity with companies looking to reduce costs. In turn, open source BI tools will be developing rapidly and should win a greater portion of deals in 2009.

Software as a Service (SaaS) will flourish in the midmarket (too, thanks to the challenging economic situation), particularly in companies that consider IT resources redundant.

For the same reason, hosted and subscription-based services will largely replace premises-based tools and platforms.

In a soft economy, any on-demand pay-as-you-go offering becomes more attractive across all customer segments. Just as important, the increasing scalability, performance, flexibility, and availability demands on the enterprise BI infrastructure are spurring many users to consider outsourced offerings.

Federated data environments will be adopted as the means to cure the problems with decentralized information scattered throughout the enterprise. IT organizations, in turn, will supplement their enterprise data warehouses by beefing up their enterprise information integration middleware and semantic virtualization layers.

Gartner, as always, is more number-oriented in its predictions: the company’s analysts predict that the lack of sufficient the information, processes and tools, along with under-investment in information infrastructure and business users’ tools will result in more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies regularly failing to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets through 2012.

Another interesting estimation by Gartner is that by 2012, business units will control at least 40% of the total budget for BI, meaning that spending on CRM (corporate performance management), online marketing analytics, predictive analytics, and other packaged applications will only go up.

Finally, mashups. Easy and cost-effective as they are, mashups will go mainstream with BI-integrated tools leading the way.

Gartner:

By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through large-grained application mashups.

First Apatar Community Award winners were announced this week.

This is the first time the company holds Community Awards, and it only shows how much the Apatar community has grown over the past year. *yay!*

This year Community Awards were given out in three nominations: Top Developer, Top Datamap Contributor, and Top Forum Member; and a total of nine “Apatarians” of 2008 received the titles and were granted 15 hours of consulting. You can see the list of ACA 2008 winners over here.

Congratulations, guys!

The Holiday season is over and as much as I hate to admit it, life is getting back to the routine.
Oh well I was going to share a few thoughts on integration before disappearing for a long weekend, but didn’t get to it in the holiday rush, so might as well do it now.

Enterprise information integration (EII), another technology that seems to be neglected in the SOA, mashup, and warehousing craze of the day.

It’s integration, however, that really expands data throughout the company. When I tried looking deeper into this concept, I came across this article on how the combination of data warehousing and EII working together could really benefit the company.

With the ability to integrate data from multiple data sources that EII tools provide, and the scalability of warehousing applications, you could work wonders. Well, see the article for yourself for more details.