CEO of global business intelligence and analytics vendor Yellowfin, Glen Rabie, has stated that industry dialogue around Big Data has negatively impacted the business analytics software market.
Rabie made the comments during a podcast with independent BI analyst, Claudia Imhoff, as part of a briefing with the Boulder BI Brain Trust forum.
Despite praising the concept of Big Data, Rabie is concerned that it is actually hurting BI.
Rabie said: "I think it’s a step backwards in terms of the engagement model of the BI industry with its customers. And what I mean by that is it’s become a very technically complex conversation. So rather than being about the business, and what businesses do with their data, and how we’ll help them to make decisions, all we’re doing now is selling the virtues of technology.
"Our customers don’t know what to use and when to use it, and we as an industry aren’t helping them. We’re not saying ‘this is when you use Hadoop, this is when you use a columnar database, this is when you just hit your relational database.
"[What we as an industry are saying is that] we want you to spend lots of money with us, buying all this technology, whether you need it or not. You’ve got to have a strategy and a business problem to solve. People shouldn’t buy technology for the sake of it."
Imhoff said that although there is value in Big Data, it has resulted in a paralysis of companies not knowing what to do as they almost have too much technology at their finger tips and do not know which one to pick to solve their problems.
Recent findings from international enterprise technology analyst firm, Gartner, have backed Rabie’s position, stating that extensive confusion among potential purchasers regarding the definitions and differences between the terms ‘Big Data’, ‘BI’ and ‘analytics’ is "blunting BI spend".
"Business Intelligence managed to grow by a reasonable 7% in 2012, [with] confusion related to emerging technology terms causing a hold on purse strings," said principal research analyst at Gartner, Dan Sommer.
