Last week I had great opportunities to touch the pulse of the BI software market and get a sense for what’s on peoples’ minds right now. At the Gartner BI Summit in London I participated on a vendor panel (barely – I arrived 10 minutes before show time due to a flight diversion to Germany because of British Snowmageddon) and co-presented about social Business Discovery with EAT Ltd., a cutting-edge QlikView customer using our software to support property acquisition decisions. While I was at the Gartner BI Summit I had a one-on-one with Gartner analyst Rita Sallam and had one-on-one meetings with eight QlikView customers. While I was in London I also spent time with a few other European industry analysts who cover QlikTech: Alys Woodward of IDC, Clive Longbottom of Quocirca, and Helena Schwenk of MWD Advisors. And, finally, last week Gartner published an update to its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms report — a pithy report full of great detail about the state of the market (download the report in its entirety here).

With all of these market touch points in a concentrated period of time, two trends floated to the surface:

• User-driven BI is becoming more prevalent. In the Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms, Gartner wrote, “In 2011, business users continued to exert significant influence over BI decisions, often choosing data discovery products in addition to/as alternatives to traditional BI tools.” At the same time, the definition of a user is broadening. Last year the analysts saw significant increases in demand from a wide array of users: line workers, business analysts, advanced analytic professionals, business executives, customers/constituents, partners, regulators, and IT professionals. An observation: IT professionals are users, not just implementers of, BI. And IT professionals are a critical part of the business, not separate from it.
• The use cases for BI platforms are broadening. I listened to or talked with people who use BI software to optimize the supply chain, identify tax dodgers, manage investment portfolios, identify at-risk medical patients, monitor network health, decide which properties to acquire, optimize street traffic patterns, identify kids likely to become unemployed so they can be helped . . . and myriad other things. The common thread among all the stories was a need to make better decisions.

I wound down the week with a strong feeling of being in the midst of a large, slow-moving storm. The use of — the very definition of — BI is changing as we speak. How is QlikTech staying ahead of the storm? With a laser focus on our mission, which is to Simplify Decisions for Everyone, Everywhere.