Business intelligence gets more mobile

Beverley Head
Thursday, 29 September 2011 18:56

Business IT - Networking

Business Intelligence specialist QlikTech has announced that it will add Android and Blackberry support to its QlikView on Mobile system early next month, clearly a bid to cash in on Gartner predictions that by 2013 a third of all business intelligence access will come via handheld devices.

The company's first foray into the mobile space was with support for Apple iOS which it delivered in July. The next version of QlikView for Mobile is scheduled for release on November 11 and will support Android and Blackberry devices.

Mark Sands, ANZ regional director for QlikTech, which has just been named as 'the rising star' of BI in the Longhaus BI and Analytics Pulse Awards, said that although mobile access to business intelligence was not new, it had previously focussed on serving up static information to a handheld device. He said that driven by consumer demand QlikView was now focussed on delivering the same level of interactive analysis that was available on a desktop, to a mobile device.

While smartphone and tablet adoption is rocketing in Australia - Google estimates that 1-2 per cent of the entire Australian population acquires a smartphone each month - Mr Sands believes demand for interactive business intelligence on a handheld device is still in its infancy. He noted that some organisations had lingering concerns about the security of providing access to BI from a mobile.

'We're in a phase at the moment where business is in the investigative stage. Organisations are starting to feel their way,' he said.

Mr Sands was unable to name any users of the mobile version of QlikView software in Australia, but he said that a telecommunications company was now equipping its salesforce with iPads to access business intelligence when dealing with customer inquiries. He said that one of the more novel international applications of iPads and QlikView was with a fishing fleet operating out of Peru where iPads were in use on boats to determine the optimal location to land a catch.

He believed that in time the real value of mobile access to BI would be that it would facilitate social collaboration, drawing on a wide variety of information and insight to inform collaboration.