There are definite signs that 2011 will be a watershed year for mobile business intelligence. Among their predictions for 2011, Gartner Research projects that fully one-third of all BI will be consumed by handheld devices within two years. Vendor Microstrategy includes three mobile BI items in their top ten highlights for 2010. On January 12 Forbes reported that 90% of IT managers surveyed plan to deploy mobile apps this year. SAP BusinessObjects, which tweeted the link to the Forbes article, is obviously interested in some of that mobile app business. And so it goes.
What's driving the move to mobile BI now? Improvements in hardware and infrastructure. Smartphones have become smart indeed, and tablet devices such as the Apple iPad and Samsumg Galaxy Tab have already rendered netbooks all but obsolete. Meanwhile, the advent of 4G broadband in the US means that wireless mobile devices have access to data speeds comparable to those available on the fastest wired networks.
To be sure, not everyone is yet sold on the new tablets. IBM reported from this week's National Retail Federation show (as tweeted by Cognos) that tablets drove the highest positive and negative sentiment over the holidays. But development is progressing rapidly: Motorola, Dell, and RIM (Blackberry) are just three companies working on bringing dual-core processing capabilities to tablets in the very near future.
Next time we'll ponder how (not to mention if) you should approach mobile BI for your business.
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