Watch the Cloud for Next Generation Analytics

This was a big week for Business Analytics solutions.

CIO’s and CDO’s struggling to deliver insights on demand with their existing business intelligence tools had some great news.

First, Tableau announced a major upgrade to Tableau 9.0.  Bringing a new user experience they call Analytics in the Flow, Tableau released their new user experience of its on-premise next-generation business intelligence suite.  Gone are the days of taking weeks or months to build static reports and hand-crafting dashboards with drill-downs and interactive visualizations.   Tableau users can connect to their data source and build dashboards in hours.  It doesn’t yet offer IBM’s artificial intelligence and automated visualizations available in its Watson Analytics but Tableau’s interface has undergone a welcome upgrade and makes the process from data to insight very smooth and fast.  Tableau users will also benefit from new data preparation capabilities, which takes messy data and cleans it up.

Next up, some real buzz was generated by stealth startup Domo, which showed its cloud-based “business management platform”.  It’s frankly amazing that they’ve built an analytics solution over the last 5 years without any marketing. Covered by TechCrunch (“With Another $200M in the Bank, Josh James Finally Takes the Wraps Off Business Analytics Startup Domo“), Domo explains the secret sauce to how their cloud platform is already generating $100 million in sales is that it can hook into more than 300 different data sources.

a platform for collecting, normalizing and visualizing business intelligence data from an incredibly wide range of sources. The idea is to make all that information available in real-time and giving executives the ability to get a completely transparent view into what’s happening throughout their companies.

Domo can extract data from everything from traditional SAP and Oracle operating databases to native cloud applications like Salesforce, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.  They claim real-time data integration and the latest in on-demand mobile applications with the latest data visualizations and dashboards.  This solution certainly raises the bar on cloud-based business solutions.

After years of building static reports, we’re finally seeing some real innovation and the promise of on-demand business analytics.  It’s an exciting time for CIO’s and CDO’s with an enterprise-wide business intelligence mandate.