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April 7, 2011 – Overall, mobile business intelligence user penetration has increased over June 2010, and plans for 24 months out are more ambitious than last year, according to new research from Dresner Advisory Services.

The “Mobile BI Market Study Update” from Dresner evaluated perceptions and plans surrounding mobile business intelligence in nearly 200 organizations. It compared changes over six months time from its previous study, such as new platform entries (e.g., Android tablets), evolved BI software offerings and increased user experience and deployments.

Howard Dresner, president of Dresner Advisory Services, predicts mobile BI will become the norm and part of the standard operating procedure in business overall. “Mobile devices are becoming part of the new platform for BI, not just an adjunct. Soon it will not be uncommon for a tablet computer to be the only device that certain roles use, for BI and other purposes,” says Dresner.

The report shows that 70 percent of respondents expect a quarter and 25 percent expect half of their user base to use BI exclusively through mobile devices within two years.

A majority of user respondents continue to view mobile BI as critical or important – unchanged from June 2010.

The priority platform is the Apple iPad, followed by the BlackBerry. This represents a shift from 2010 when the iPhone was more dominant. iPad interest last year has translated into significant deployments for mobile BI, with a modest increase in the iPhone and decreased usage of BlackBerry and Windows phones as platforms. Growing interest is present for Android devices – especially tablets.

The Web remains the most popular form of integration. Vendor support for alerts has improved since June, but has been limited. KPI monitoring grew sharply as a “critical” feature. There was modest growth in demand for advanced features such as guided analysis and dashboard assembly, according to the study.
The demand for executive use of mobile BI solidified its top spot (top priority within approximately 80 percent of organizations) – with a slight uptick in demand for customers and suppliers.

Small and midsized organizations were more likely than larger enterprises to serve mobile BI with information from software as a service BI applications.

The majority of respondents expect data to reside on both - devices and servers. BI software vendors indicated that mobile BI holds greater importance generally, and believe it to be more “critical” than six months ago.

Read more Information Management coverage of Dresner BI surveys here.

Valerie Valentine is senior editor for Information Management. You can follow her on Twitter at @va1va1entine or via email at valerie.valentine@sourcemedia.com.