Take

In our benchmark research on the relation between business intelligence (BI) and search capabilities, Ventana Research assessed overall trends and the maturity of 322 organizations. Research participants indicated that most of the integrated search and BI applications they have deployed or will deploy in the next year involve running ad-hoc queries against BI data; most of those participants assigned high value to having one place to search for all content. Asked what is the most valuable way in which this combination of technologies can address their BI needs, the most respondents (59 percent) identified using search as an ad-hoc query interface for BI. This finding reflects the difficulty of using BI tools to perform ad-hoc analysis – a chronic issue for users. Our research shows that deploying search for ad-hoc querying also is the number-one planned initiative for the next 12 months in participating organizations.

Ventana Research believes that as a query tool, search has the potential to change how organizations use BI and to simplify the complexities of current SQL-based interfaces that restrict flexibility. We predict that having search as the query interface will drive businesses to broader deployments of BI across the enterprise.