I recently received a TDWI webinar invitation with a catchy subject line.
Want Faster BI? How Search Makes Your Analytics More Accessible
I immediately thought of my previous article (see related article, The Road Unexplored: A Future for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer) and continued to read.
Search-driven BI solutions can make finding and querying data a faster and easier experience. Most users are only familiar with search through the use of commercial search engines. However, search can help users quickly locate data and analyze it, and it can also help the entire organization by building a reusable knowledge base about the data and how it is used.
Intrigued, I signed up for the August 4 webinar which began with some market insights from David Stodder, Senior Director of Research for Business Intelligence at TDWI. It then transitioned into a sponsored presentation from ThoughtSpot. I was not familiar with ThoughtSpot but learned from their web site that they were identified by Gartner, a leading research firm, as one of the “Cool Vendors in Analytics” in 2016. Cool like Arthur Fonzarelli.
OH YES I visit when I’m in Milwaukee pic.twitter.com/75GVCPL2YX
— Henry Winkler (@hwinkler4real) August 9, 2016
And in their Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics, Gartner identified ThoughtSpot along with Attivio, Connexica, Incorta, and Zoomdata as providers of “Search-Based Data Discovery”.
Based on SAP’s BI roadmap, it might seem that Qlik and Tableau are the only other vendors in the analytics market. But vendors like ThoughtSpot continue to demonstrate that the idea of search-powered analytics we first saw nine years ago as BusinessObjects Polestar remains a powerful one.
Gartner thinks search-based analytics is a cool idea. Let’s hope that somebody at SAP still does, too.
Read Part One of this article, The Road Unexplored: A Future for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.
Search-Based Data Discovery Vendors
Search-based Data Discovery in the Press
Thoughtspot’s Search for Data Analytics Finds Results Fast by Phil Wainewright, published by Diginomica August 16, 2016
Links for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
- Official web site for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
- How and when will Explorer functionality migrate to Lumira? on SAP Community Network
So I’m looking into search based BI. In conversations with SAP and looking at what they’re doing it does seem like the building blocks are being put into place (especially on the HANA side). Although they will probably get Tableau’ed on this as vendors like ThoughtSpot are entering the market. My recommendation would be for them to invest heavily into this before they get left behind. Start by purchasing a company called AnswerRocket and then look into integration for technologies such as Apache Solr and Elastisearch. Take a look at the Enterprise Knowledge Graph proposed by Lukas Masuch (http://www.mixprize.org/hack/enterprise-knowledge-graph-one-graph-connect-them-all) as an example of where they should be going. They still have a long way to go before they catch up to the likes of IBM Watson but it’s possible. They just need 3 billion dollars worth of belief in search like IBM has.
Kevin,
Thanks for the response. Are you using Explorer in your BI landscape today?
Dallas