The Time Has Come for the Cloud

• “Cloud BI is now getting the attention it deserves,” says Dr. Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC. “Increased discussion about home offices and the digital workplace in society and politics is creating a positive climate and experience for the use of cloud applications. The main arguments in favor of BI solutions in the cloud are today’s increased requirements for flexibility and speed. New data and reports can be made available quickly to changing user groups.”
• Like last year, master data and data quality management, data discovery, data-driven corporate culture, data governance and self-service analytics are voted as the top five trends.
• “Attention is the new oil”: Alerting takes off as a new trend.

The analyst firm BARC publishes the Data, BI & Analytics Trend Monitor 2021 at this year’s Big Data & AI World Frankfurt online conference. 2,259 users were surveyed for the study, providing a comprehensive overview of the current trends in the global market for data management, BI and analytics.

For the fourth year in a row, master data and data quality management is voted the number one trend. This year’s development towards the digital workplace has propelled the “Cloud” trend to its highest ranking to date. The full report is available as a free download.

Cloud on the rise

“Cloud BI is not a new trend, but this year we see it is finally reaching end users. We think this is at least partly due to the current coronavirus crisis,” says BARC founder and CEO Dr. Carsten Bange, explaining the rise of the cloud from 18th place last year to 14th place.

“Homeworking is currently the subject of much discussion in politics and society. The cloud plays a central role here as it allows flexible access to applications and data from any location. Furthermore, cloud applications can often be set up and implemented more quickly, which meets the rapidly growing need for speed and flexibility. More flexible billing models are also better suited to the uncertainty and unpredictability of these dynamic times. Cloud BI is now getting the attention it deserves.”

No major shifts despite coronavirus crisis

Despite the global changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the leading trends remain unchanged. Like last year, master data and data quality management, data discovery, data-driven corporate culture, data governance and self-service analytics are voted as the top five trends.

“Business intelligence systems have played a central role in enabling decision-makers to quickly bring transparency to where and how the pandemic is affecting their business,” says Dr. Carsten Bange.

“In addition, the rapid adaptation of scenarios and forecasts has been required as well as the creation of new reports and dashboards with new content. The five strongest trends are all vital to enabling companies to make data-driven decisions. This became more important in 2020 than ever before.”

Alerting – a new trend takes off

Among the newly added trends for 2021, respondents rated alerting as one of their top ten topics despite the tendency for new trends not to perform well in their first year in the Data, BI & Analytics Trend Monitor.
Dr. Carsten Bange explains this development: “Attention is the new oil: In a BI system, a great deal of data is presented in various reports and dashboards and users are sometimes overloaded with it. Our survey respondents obviously find it helpful for the system to actively point out what is important to users or what they should derive an action from. Software vendors are also making a lot of progress in this area.”