Two days @ the Gartner BI Summit

London Heathrow, Terminal 5. 6pm GMT. I am tired. Really tired. Museum visits, shopping trips and conference whirlwinds belong to a category of highly rewarding and fun activities, yet they also belong to the category of activities that can only be classified as “Holy smokes, why am I so exhausted?” type of things.

THE GARTNER BI SUMMIT

Gartner does a fine job of producing highly relevant and engaging events. The 2011 EMEA Summit was no different. Over 700 people attended the well organized event at the Westminster Plaza hotel in London.

OPENING DAY

The opening day offered some great presentations. I liked the Gartner keynote which highlighted some of the key themes that are happening in the market. A few interesting things that came up include:

  • 62% of all EMEA organizations have a BI strategy. That is a positive change from the prior years.
  • BUT…only 1/3 of all organizations have a real BICC. But Gartner highlighted that a BICC is somewhat of a ‘secret sauce’ for success in BI.
  • Organizations are very interested in Predictive Analytics, In-Memory, Master Data Management & Dashboarding
  • Success means going for BIG BI: not just platform but rather a complete view of people, process & technology.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Nigel Rayner hosted a great and fun panel session with participants from the main BI vendors. Peter Griffiths represented our IBM Cognos team. Nigel did a great job with the panel and he got the audience actively involved by voting on certain topics. A few interesting points:

  • iPads everywhere

    A big majority of the participants believe mobile BI will play a huge role in the future. Not a big surprise.

    Collaboration & social media will change the game for BI

    Many people believe that a large portion of BI spending will go SIs instead of software vendors.

  • 90% of the audience members believed that predictive analytics will become accessible to a broader user spectrum
  • Many delegates are unsure whether BI hardware & software should be bundled

OUR KEYNOTE & WORKSHOPS

On the second day of the conference, Leah Macmillian and I delivered the IBM keynote. It was great to see so many people in the room. We spent almost 50% of our allocated time on showing Cognos 10. Many people in the audience seemed surprised as we were the only vendor to show product. A bit of a surprise to me. Why would you spend so much time talking about future direction instead of showing what you can do now? Everybody has great ideas but at the end of the day we need to deliver value now. Right? No surprise: We did get a ton of questions following our presentation.

CONCLUSION

Kudos to Gartner. It was a great event. Excellent content and excellent participants. I really enjoyed the networking with so many great people. It was cool to see that our IBM portfolio pretty much covers all the main trends that were discussed at the Summit: Mobile, Collaboration, In-Memory, Predictive Analytics etc.. Cognos 10 is a great platform. Gartner’s assessment of IBM’s position in the market clearly highlighted this.


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