InetSoft Webinar: Technology, Employees, and Organizations

This is a continuation of the transcipt of a webinar hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and he discusses the topic “The Advantages of Mobile Business Intelligence".

Mark Flaherty: Now, one of the things that is a bit surprising is that almost as many organizations are using smartphones as are using laptops. Some of the organizations using smartphones who are using Mobile BI are also using laptops and Mobile BI, too. Something else that’s apparent is that the use of all four devices here - laptops, smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

The best performance companies have the widest mix. And I think it's clear that many organizations will be using multiple device types for mobile BI for the foreseeable future. So a mobile BI solution that works on multiple devices is going to be key to achieving a successful and uneventful rollout.

If we look at smartphones in particular, I think there are probably four points to make. First, despite all the buzz around the Apple devices, one year from now there will still be more organizations using BlackBerry for mobile BI than Apple. And I think that’s true in part due to their strong corporate presence RIM already has and also due to the robust security those devices have already had built in.

Secondly, given the usage in terms of organizations one year from now, there will be as many people using Android for Mobile BIs as there are using Apple. So at that point, they are looking at Windows 7. Microsoft has been such a marginal player for a long time with mobile devices, but I think it's looking surprisingly strong if we look at the purchase intentions for the organizations who are planning to use Microsoft and Windows 7. And finally, we did also look at data on platforms of operating system such as Symbian, but all of those usage rate are low with low growth forecasts for the next year.

If you look at tablets as well, we looked at the data on purchase intentions for the next 12 months as tablets were so new to the market. The BlackBerrry PlayBook had not been launched, yet.. But I will be interested on your viewpoint on that device in a second.

Now, something else which is also significant is that two-thirds as many organizations are planning to use tablets in the next 12 months as are currently using smartphones. So I think there is something of a trend analysis; there is significant number of people who plan to adopt the tablet for Mobile BI are actually likely to bypass the use of smartphones of the BI all together and just go from laptops to the tablet devices. Iit clearly looks like almost half of the organizations are planning to use Apple so clearly Apple is the dominant platform that you folks will have your eyes on the use of tablet devices.

So let me just finish off this part of the presentation then by talking about some of the future directions of mobile BI. Almost all of your new BI reports and dashboards will be developed primarily for mobile devices within the next 12 months. So there will clearly be a strong commitment from those organizations to make towards Mobile BI platforms. A lot of companies will rewrite existing reports and dashboards for the optimal usage on mobile devices within the next year. So that means they will take their key BI assets that they have and tweak them so they are more effective in the mobile world.

Read the top 10 reasons for selecting InetSoft as your BI partner.

Finally then, companies will want BI software that allows them to build reports, charts and dashboards, build them once and deploy them to any device. However, by the end of the year, most of the leading organizations will have that capability in place so clearly they will be supporting multiple devices, mobile devices, but also desktop devices for a long time. So they want to build out this report writing capability. They want to write a report or dashboard once and deploy it to multiple different device types and not have to rewrite it for every different device they have.

Well that’s our overview of the need for mobile business intelligence and some insight into how leading companies are approaching and managing this emerging opportunity. InetSoft was an early leader in visualization-driven BI, and with this latest release we are providing support for a wide array of mobile platforms and enabling our customers to support their mobile workforces with user driven business intelligence solutions.