Salesforce is buying Tableau and Google Cloud is adding Looker to its family. After reviewing a panoply of studies about business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data warehousing, we found it evident that both acquisitions will provide best-in-class functionality addressing the needs of both business analysts and the IT department, as well as leadership in high-growth markets that are only tangentially related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Twenty-eight percent of IT professionals believe that over the next five years more sophisticated data integration capabilities will be the focus in business intelligence and analytics software development, according to SharesPost’s October 2018 survey. This was a dramatic rise from only 10% that said so in the 2017 survey. Expectations also increased about the attention that will be paid to data visualization capabilities. The notable losers are machine learning integration and predictive analytics. This does not mean that ML and predictive analytics use has dropped — the same study found that the use of predictive analytics in BI tools rose from 41% to 67% over the same time period. Instead, developers may believe that the predictive power of new technologies will be less important than actually managing and visually exploring the data that is being analyzed.
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