It's pretty clear why business intelligence initiatives continue to top CIO priorities, as executives from the boardroom on down demand better visibility. The problem is that BI often has fallen short of ideal, delivering insight into the past but not into up-to-the-moment performance or future prospects. That's about to change. Next-generation BI has arrived, and three major factors are driving it: the spread of predictive analytics, more real-time performance monitoring, and much faster analysis, thanks to in-memory BI. A fourth factor, software as a service, promises to further alter the BI market by helping companies get these next-generation systems running more quickly.
