Is the iPad the new normal for data visualization?
Summary: Gartner publishes its report on Mobile BI and the winning vendor finds mobile is the driving factor in more and more of its pipeline.
Last weekmonth, Gartner released its "Critical Capabilities for Mobile BI" report and the results were interesting indeed. The vendor that came in with the highest overall product rating, was not a data visualization start-up, a self-service BI specialist vendor, or one of the "mega-vendors." instead, it was the longtime BI pure play MicroStrategy (who will happily share a copy of the Gartner report with you at http://www.microstrategy.com/mobile/analyst-reviews).
For me, the timing of all of this is quite striking, as I had interviewed Jeff Bedell, MicroStrategy's CTO, and Brian Brinkmann, its Senior Director, Product Marketing, only a bit more than a week priortwo weeks later, having not yet seen the report, and mobile dominated the conversation. There were a couple of reasons for this.
It all starts with a good app First off, the company's MicroStrategy Mobile for iPad app looks excellent. It's a fully native iOS app, rather than a simple container created to host HTML 5 content. And in this same spirit of building a data visualization delivery experience tailored for the iPad, it also allows users to design content specifically for the iPad, rather than simply re-purpose their desktop dashboards.
Yes, the tablet experience can be a bit hard to share, but MicroStrategy's iPad app is also Apple AirPlay-compatible, allowing visualizations to be displayed on a big-screen TV or projector, as long as an Apple TV device is connected. In fact, my interviewees told me they hardly ever do "wired" presentations in their office anymore. In other words, running dashboards off a laptop connected to a projector over a VGA or HDMI cable is a thing of the past at MicroStrategy.
Little screen, Big Data And lest you think that, as a BI company, MicroStrategy produces products that can only work against medium data loads, rest assured that circumstances are quite to the contrary. Case in point: MicroStrategy has had a long standing partnership with Cloudera and can connect to Hadoop via Hive. MicroStrategy also has a partnership with Teradata, and the two companies have a great many customers in common.
Mobile no longer optional So if MicroStrategy does Big Data, why does it also do small screens? Because that very combination is becoming prevalent. Only recently, BI companies were able to use a mobile app as a unique competitive advantage. Then the plot thickened and mobile apps became a requirement as customers did their vendor selection.
That requirement arose because high-level executives really wanted their dashboards on their tablets. As such, a significant requirement was being driven by a small percentage of users.
But now even that has progressed. MicroStrategy told me that for many business users (as opposed to IT professionals), the tablet has become the primary device for doing data visualization and exploration. And MicroStrategy finds that their Mobile app isn't just a sweetener that helps close new business, but is instead the factor driving several of its recent deals.
Analysts, start your iPads That's huge. Or should I say "Big?" Big Data on small devices is looking more and more like the new reality for data visualization. And it turns out the Gartner report is following something substantive, significant and which is becoming increasingly mainstream.
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Talkback
Was there and old normal? if so what was it?
There was an old normal
By those standards
Were there other options?
Such as, but not limited to, high resolution color display, Internet connectivity via WiFi and/or Cellular, capacitive touch screen, an extensive Apps ecosystem?
Today, data is presented on many platforms:
The desktop, tablet and other mobile devices, including phones and specialized displays, ranting from small server or even disk attached displays, to large high resolution displays, sometimes covering a wall. It all depends on whom you ask and what data you are presenting.
But the tablet is already one of the established options, thanks to the iPad.
Wait for us!
Nice Dream
It's odd
Another mess stems from the Munchkins who tell us that Windows 8 will rule the tablet world because of all the legacy Windows apps. Then we find out that not only have they forked Win 8 and created a version (RT) that doesn't run Windows legacy apps, they've entered into deals with some hardware vendors to produce tablets that run Windows Phone. That isn't a strategy; it's throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks. That, and letting the sales force run the company.
Robert Hahn: You seem to be having a lot of fun,
Hoping for something to happen is not necessarily going to make it happen, and you need to examine the history of new technology in order to give a fair assessment of any product. The same kind of predictions were being made about the iPad before it came on the scene, and now, it's part of an accepted ecosystem which includes iPhone and iCloud and Macs.
So, why not hold off on your "negative enthusiasm", and come back with your "predictions" and "hopes for failure", one year after the Windows 8 lineup has been released?
Your kind of predictions were also being made about the XBox, and, what happened with that system?
adornoe: Nothing of this is predictions
Windows 8 is one of these things. It is not going to happen.
Now, you need to understand what is not going to happen, or go back to "but Microsoft won't fail" mantra.
What is not going to happen is for Windows 8 to be successful. The reason for this is very, very simple: Microsoft are not brave enough.
Microsoft is not brave enough to do the right thing. And the right thing in this case is to create an entirely new platform, based on WinRT, avoid any bloat from Win32 and move forward. Their current platform customers will be happy with Windows 7. Windows 8 could have been just an incremental improvement from Windows 7, based more or less on the same code base.
In just few years, WinRT would have provided Microsoft with an modern, more secure and more performant platform -- free from the junk they have accumulated over the years.
Microsoft goofed already one time with Windows NT, by "integrating" it into Win32, instead of doing the right thing and integrate Win32 into Windows NT. But, while at that time Microsoft succeeded because of the huge "PC" push they had from IBM and then joined forces with Intel on "let's create an duopoly" --- now things are different. Everyone other has had time to prepare their act and are now executing. Except Microsoft, and as it seems, Intel.
PS: What is the profit to Microsoft from the Xbox? Wonder, when the lawsuit for cross-subsiding the games console business from the monopoly desktop/server money will happen. :)
Wait for the Bright Future
Your opinion may be worth something when you get to year 8
iPad is the New Normal
My customers perceive tablet-driven data access as a requirement rather than a competitive differentiator, and that's happened in a relatively short period of time. Many companies are now struggling with the BYOD challenge to secure and segregate corporate from personal data - but that's not enough to stop the sea change.