An interesting blog by Richard Hackathorn over on b.eye. It seems Richard sat through 18 – 1 hour pitches by a number of BI vendors, (interestingly SAS and IBM/Cognos were missing from the role call) and blogged his thoughts in real-time during the presentations.

After skim reading the blogs (and ignoring the blog cloud, interesting how often Teradata was mentioned) two key things stood out for me:

1) In terms of Data Integration real-time (or near real-time at least) is going to be the next wave, predominately on the back of DW “Appliances”

2) In terms of BI Front ends, mashups is going to be the buzz word for a while.

I think real-time data integration has been talked about for long enough that the capability now exists in the DI products in some form or other, and that the driver towards real time reporting from large ERP systems (think Oracle and SAP), means that this wave will actually start happening in the real world.

This is especially true with the pre-dominance of DW “Appliances” hitting the market.

As for mashups I am not so convinced. Orginally Portals were going to deliver this nirvana, then the introduction of JSR 168 would supposedly allow all portals and BI tools to talk to each other. Mashups just seem to web 2.0 for the BI vendors (who lets face it are still way behind the SaaS wave) to actually deliver with their current 1-2 yearly release cycles.

Will be interesting to see who from the big BI vendors starts talking mashups first, and who actually delivers. My guess is the new tier BI vendors will lead the way with this one.