Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics spreads far beyond the world of marketing effectiveness, sales efficiency and customer service. It touches these areas in the form of Analytical CRM – but it also engages ERP and logistics, Human Resources and assets, time recording and performance monitoring. It touches every area of the business.

Do you have a wide variety of Excel spreadsheets and reports on people’s desktops and circulating around the office? Do you always know which is the latest and most current version of a spreadsheet or report?

In the 1990s Excel emerged as the de facto standard for analysis. It is bundled inside Microsoft Office and it offers flexibility (manipulation) not offered by Crystal and other reporting tools. And people have become very good at building complex analytics inside Excel workbooks, worksheets and pivot tables. To get anything more sophisticated – a true multi-dimensional business intelligence tool – is often seen as cost prohibitive; well known tools like Business Objects, Cognos and others being intensive consumers of resources and time.

Aberdeen Group and Gartner have recently been tracking the emergence of a new technology in the field of BI. The technology is known as “in-memory” BI and it offers fast, memory-resident analytics without the need to build a server-based data warehouse and without the need to build OLAP “cubes”. This market has recently been assessed by both of the research organisations mentioned and their findings are available as downloads from this page.

The emergence of this new in-memory BI technology is disrupting the way business users and IT managers think about analytics and traditional BI - in a massively positive way.