Nucleus Top 10 Predictions For 2013

THE BOTTOM LINE

This year presented some significant shifts in the strategies of some long-dominant vendors toward cloud, social capabilities, services, integration, analytics, and partner ecosystem plays — showing that all dogs must learn new tricks or will likely lose market share and dominant positions in 2013.

THE PREDICTIONS

Nucleus’s 2013 Predictions are influenced by our ongoing analysis of IT investment and decision makers as part of our ongoing research and case study analysis, as well as the macro and microeconomic factors that shape buying decisions in the technology industry. They fall into three key areas: emerging technologies, trends in key application markets, and the broader impact of technology on consumer and business activity.

A BI CHICKEN IN EVERY POT AND A BIG DATA INTERPRETER IN EVERY VILLAGE

Nucleus expects BI adoption will double worldwide in 2013 as greater usability for nonexpert analytics users, lower-cost options including cloud and SaaS, and further efforts by vendors to make BI accessible to every user will drive broader adoption of business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics. The great potential ROI opportunities from pervasive BI will make 2013 the watershed year for BI adoption and vendors with usability advantages and adoption paths for individual end users beyond the data geeks will reap the rewards. The increased availability of analytics has led to a new sort of statistics-driven genius, the superstar data interpreter embodied by the likes of Moneyball's Billy Beane or the New York Times's Nate Silver. Although these stars are fluent in analytics and statistics, their primary value is derived from their ability to translate statistical analysis into business decisions. To maximize analytics ROI, every organization needs to identify its own Billy Beane and give that person access to pervasive and predictive analytics.