Email marketers need data systems that can pull information from anywhere in an organization. And they may be getting them, according to The State Of SQL And BI: The Data Analysts’ Perspective, a study by Ascend2 in partnership with bipp, a business intelligence firm.
Business intelligence (BI) budgets are significantly rising in 49% of companies, and moderately in 36%. Another 12% say their BI spend remains the same, and 3% are decreasing it.
Of the professionals polled, 75% utilize Structured Query Language (SQL) databases, 57% use Google Analytics and 46% use Excel sheets.
What do users seek in a BI tool? They want:
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However, analysts and executives view things in slightly different ways.
Executives seek security (29%), reporting & analytics features (26%) and natural-language query (23%).
The two sides also differ on the challenges they face. For 42%, the top obstacle is quality of IT infrastructure. And 41% say it is data security. But again, executives and analysts have differing views.
Executives list their challenges as:
Analysts disagree. Their major issues are:
In general, 90% agree that their BI platform should include a data modeling language that allows them to create reusable data models using SQL syntax, with 49% strongly concurring. Another 10% are neutral.
Here are the BI platform features that respondents expect will have the greatest impact on their programs over the next two to five years:
All that said, here are the useful solutions, as rated by the respondents:
Ascend2 surveyed 218 data professionals.