Intelligent Enterprise

Author David Hatch of Aberdeen Group didn't underscore this point in this week's feature on "Best-in-Class Secrets to Mobile BI Success," but it's pretty clear that the Mobile offerings from the major business intelligence vendors won't end up driving anywhere near the lion's share of mobile BI adoption. The evidence, as well as common sense, tells us that mobile applications with embedded intelligence will be the locus of most mobile BI.

That's not to say that the likes of Business Objects Mobile, Cognos Go!Mobile, Information Builders Mobile Favorites and Microstrategy Mobile won't see demand. It's just that there are only so many situations in which dashboards, scorecards and reports built on the parent platforms need to be mobilized. In our own poll, posted on our home page, the readers of Intelligent Enterprise didn't exactly place mobile BI as a high priority when asked, Which best describes your status/attitude toward mobile (smart phone) delivery of business intelligence?:

Ouch. That says a lot, but as for the 46 percent for whom mobile BI is at least on radar, "for the most part, they want to address particular questions in the context of transactions," says Gartner analyst Ted Friedman.

As Aberdeen identifies in the graphic below, field sales, customer service and field service will drive nearly 60 percent of mobile BI adoption, and these areas in which sales force automation, CRM and custom applications dominate. Sure, executives want to see the latest insights, too, but is timely information more likely to come out of a data warehouse or an application on the front lines of the business? If you're not convinced, check out the "Best-in-Class Technology Adoption Plans" chart in this article.

So where should you turn for Mobile BI? I'd keep a sharp eye on the type of demand you're seeing internally as well as the promise and prowess you're seeing from application and BI vendors. Don Campbell, CTO at Cognos, an IBM Company, says location intelligence is one area to watch.

"Mobile systems aren't just tapping into servers to pull up reports, they're also passing to the server location information and calling back location-specific content," Campbell points out, citing law enforcement applications, whereby cops can pull up location-relevant information on criminals as they are on patrol. It's no surprise that Cognos' latest Go!Mobile upgrade can make use of device-delivered location information.

Another area to watch will be support for fast-growing platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android. On the iPhone front, Oracle introduced the Business Indicators iPhone app in July, and little more than a month later it reported more than 23,000 downloads.

As for Android, "I think corporate-embeddable application will be a driver because it offers a rich development platform," Campbell predicts. "There are going to be a lot of mashable applications that can be created on the Android platform, and that fits very well with the Google way of doing things."

Of course, a larger battle over where and how BI is developed and delivered is heating up on desktops and on the back end, these days, with companies like SAP and Oracle talking up BI embedded within the context of apps and business processes while IBM, Microsoft and many independents stress application- and process-agnostic information and BI infrastructure. I doubt packaged apps will have as much of an edge on this front as in the mobile battle, but 2009 promises to be year of new skirmishes.

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