ITWire

Speaking at Kickstart in Queensland earlier this week, Information Builder's vice president of sales, Rob Mills said that without ubiquitous access, mobile business intelligence applications would fail. Mobile BI also needed to deliver tools to allow the mobile users to interrogate the information base he said.

The company has already widely deployed predictive analytics systems on Blackberrys for law enforcement agencies across the US and Europe. Today it launched WebFOCUS Mobile BI which will work on any smartphone and any tablet including iOS iPhones and iPads and Android based systems.

This it claimed was particularly important for organisations which wanted to push out business intelligence data where the location, device and browser of the recipient was not known.  This is increasingly the case even in enterprises where consumer technology is percolating rapidly.

An embedded analytics engine in the WebFOCUS tool allows mobile users to interrogate the underlying information in the BI application from their device. An individual license is not required.

Demand for mobile BI is expected to rise swiftly this decade. According to Gartner by 2013 a third of all business intelligence applications will be accessed via handheld devices.

Beverley Head attended Kickstart as a guest of Media Connect.