Getting Ready for the Big Data Impact on Business Intelligence

Regardless of how you feel about Big Data, the fact is that there is likely to be a lot more of it outside your organization than in it. The simple reason for this is that end users are going to want to be able to compare data from multiple sources. Moving and aggregating all that data isn’t going to be very practical. In reality, end users are going to want analytic tools that can be easily applied to multiple sources of Big Data.

That’s the strategy behind a recent move by BIME, a provider of a business intelligence application delivered as a service, to add support for Google BigQuery, a service for analyzing massive amounts of Big Data that is managed by Google.

According to BIME CEO Rachel Delacour, Google BigQuery will turn out to be only one of many sources of Big Data. IT organizations are going to be looking for BI tools that are optimized to compare and contrast data across multiple data sources in the cloud as opposed to more traditional BI tools that are optimized for specific data warehouses.

The new IT reality, adds Delacour, is that all that data is going to be federated across the Web, which in turn is driving a revolution in how BI tools will be used.

There’s no doubt that something profound is taking shape in terms of how data is being stored, accessed and shared across the Web. Whether existing BI tools can adapt to those changes remains to be seen. But clearly IT organizations are going to rethink their data management strategies in the face of that new reality, which is likely to have a major downstream impact on just about every enterprise application in use today.