It Depends on What you Mean by "Infrastructure"

There's a lot of talk in the wake of all the BI combinations of what role BI actually "plays" in the technology world. For while there are (and hopefully will always be) great vendors that provide specialized BI capabilities that addresses specific audience or industry needs (think vertical specialities like CPG trade promotion analysis analytics), for the most part, with all the big players now having a full-blown BI portfolio, BI is now largely a feature of the infrastructure--albeit a huge feature--but a feature nonetheless--of that these vendors are selling to the market.

Which begs the question, "what do you mean by "infrastructure?"" Because that can mean a few different things.

On the one hand, with data warehousing, data integration, and all the security, administration, etc. abilities that come with BI these days, saying that it's now an infrastructure play is easy to follow. Most of the BI platform plays are administered by IT, not the end users, so they're a core part of what IT delivers to the rest of the employee base. So infrastructure as a technical term is well understood.

But taken another way, infrastructure can also mean "embedded." And this view of BI is far more interesting in my opinion. Because for most vendors the goal is to have "BI everywhere" and "BI ubiquity" and "BI democracies" (and I could go on with pithy vendor terms), we only achieve this if business intelligence is inherently baked into my daily job. I may not even know I'm using BI--I just see an alert, pull up a credit score, see a forecast trend, all within my daily routine. BI? Never heard of it.

That's where I suspect we'll start to see the next cool aspects of BI and performance management emerge. We're already seeing vendors talk about embedded BI--part of the process, part of your job, not something that you have to do different. You don't have to stop what you're doing, log into a system, run a report, then resume your work--you just right click and pull up the report, for instance.

There are some vendors that are farther along than others in getting BI to this level, and whereas sexy graphics and analytics were all the rage just a few cycles ago, be on the look-out for embedded BI capabilities coming to an application near you for the next big thing.