A report from research firm IDG (and sponsored by Informatica), 63 percent of more than 400 IT executives say they plan to deploy or investigate cloud-based analytics in 2016. And more than 70 percent plan to deploy such services over the next three years.

Informatica, which went private earlier this year with Microsoft among the investors, just last week hired Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis away from Cary-based SAS.

SAS has invested heavily in cloud services to expand the reach of its own analytics offerings.

According to IDG, the demand for cloud analytics has now reached a “tipping point” as companies seek to capitalize and monetize the surging amount of data worldwide from biotech to personal shopping habits.

“With most business analytics solutions today, iterative development, experimentation and incremental roll-outs have become the norm. This agility and adaptability of the solutions is one of the biggest selling points of cloud analytics services, which allow customers to try and buy, scale up (or down), and rapidly address unexpected new requirements,” said Dan Vesset, Program vice president, Business Analytics and Information Management at IDC, about the report.

And Informatica, which has a presence in RTP after purchasing Triangle-based StrikeIron, sees big opportunities in the cloud.
      “IDG’s survey shows that cloud analytics is on the fast track to becoming the new normal for enterprise analytics, supporting user requirements for enhanced functionality, flexible data access and simplicity, and IT requirements for lower costs and increased agility. The survey also makes it clear that as customers move to attain these advantages, they are not going to compromise on data security. It also reveals that they want the fullest measure of flexibility and ease-of-use from their cloud analytics solutions in order to empower the growing class of users who need analytic capabilities, but who lack the specialized skills required by legacy on-premise solutions,” noted Ajay Gandhi, vice president, product marketing for Informatica Cloud.

Here are key points of the report:

  • “Cloud analytics adoption is being driven primarily by escalating end user requirements for improved analytics – This includes improved quality and consistency of data across systems (77%), improved ways to visually explore data (72%) and real-time data aggregation and analysis (70%).
  • “Adoption is also being driven by the need to access an expanding range of data sources, both cloud and on-premise – Survey respondents cited the need to analyze data from on-premise applications (56%), on-premise data warehouses (54%), cloud data warehouses (45%) and SaaS applications (43%). Support for big data sources is another specific demand (63%).
  • “Cloud analytics is fast becoming mainstream – Respondents with cloud analytics projects in the works or on their radar have, on average, 15 analytics projects underway or in planning in the next 12 months. Of those projects, 46% will involve the use of cloud analytics solutions.
  • “Early adopters are already deploying robust data frameworks – 15% of respondents have already deployed one or more cloud analytics solution, including such foundational technologies as cloud databases (75% among respondents who have deployed any cloud analytics solutions), cloud data integration (71%) such as Informatica Cloud, and cloud data warehousing (54%).
  • “Cloud analytics benefits are eclipsing those of on-premise analytics offerings – Respondents with deployed cloud analytics solutions cite the advantages of lower upfront costs (60%) over on-premise solutions, as well as greater agility and faster time to market (57%), more rapid and cost-effective scaling for larger data sets (55 %) and self-service capabilities for non-technical users (51%).
  • “Current use cases are broad – Surveyed organizations with deployed cloud analytics solutions are using them for a wide variety of purposes, including incorporating analytics into CRM, SCM and other operational applications (41%), achieving faster time to value for analytics projects (40%), analyzing cloud data sources such as SaaS, social and IoT (39%), and hybrid data warehousing (39%), among others.
  • “Top 5 solution evaluation criteria – Respondents identified numerous key evaluation criteria for buying a cloud analytics solution. The top five are robustness of data security framework (80% rating this as critical or very important), ease of use (80%), ease of on-going administration (77%), ability to integrate on-premise and cloud data (77%), and ability to reconcile/cleanse data (75%). These were followed closely by availability of implementation resources and speed of implementation.”

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