I traveled to Las Vegas this week with some PivotLink customers and partners to attend the Gartner BI Summit 2010. We not only debuted ReadiMetrix for Sales, Marketing and Human Capital Management to the crowd but we announced the new 4.3 release of our SaaS BI Platform. As the only pure-play SaaS BI vendor in the exhibit hall we drew a tremendous amount of traffic to the booth, where we engaged both line of business users and IT professionals in extensive demos and discussion around the New BI.

PivotLink’s vision for the New BI intends to create a business world where everyone is empowered – especially business users who are ultimately responsible for the decisions and outcomes made using enterprise data. Of the many conversations I had with attendees and analysts, several points stood out in support of our vision for the New BI:

1. Business users are yearning for tools that will allow them to explore and analyze their data independently without waiting for IT
2. IT won’t resist something that makes business users more effective while reducing their workload
3. The New BI will help build a bridge between IT and the line of business thereby driving rapid cultural changes

While the majority of the Gartner crowd is still ensconced in on-premise BI solutions, there is increasing interest in and shift towards SaaS BI as well as other next-gen solutions like mobile BI. In my opinion, this is being driven by business users who are starting to have a greater influence in the BI buying process and who have a greater need for analytics as part of their day-to-day work activities. Bill Hostman’s Monday morning keynote spoke about how IT needs to get closer to the business and help define top level metrics for organizational performance, while linking those metrics to the operational metrics that are used every day to run the company. Howard Dresner’s Tuesday afternoon keynote touched on similar themes. From his persepctive, business intelligence tools are going from being in the hands of a few to the hands of many and this will eventually create stronger “cultures of performance” in organizations. He also commented on how innovations in the UI and cloud computing are allowing the industry to finally deliver on the promise of insight for everyone.

Several other analysts and sessions called out the future of BI. Specifically, Rita L. Sallam’s two sessions entitled Achieving the Holy Grail of BI through Collaborative Decision Making and Defining your BI Platform mentioned SaaS BI as a compelling and viable option. Whit Andrew’s session on BI and the Google Generation: Searching for New Ways to Analyze Information gave a glimpse into the UI of the future – which will look a lot different than they do today. This session reminded me of an earlier post I wrote which highlighted the notion that “your grandfather’s BI” will likely fall short of meeting the needs of an emerging workforce raised on You Tube, Twitter, Google and the iPhone.

All in all it was a great conference. I was excited by the wide range of practitioners who took an interest in learning about PivotLink’s SaaS BI and their ensuing desire to figure out how to bring the New BI into their organizations. There is no doubt in my mind that the BI industry is about to experience alot of change. And PivotLink will be there leading the way!!

Did you attend the conference? What sessions and conversations sparked your interest? Did you walk away with a great tip or strategy to approach things differently? Let us know.