on Many thanks to those in the Boston area who attended our second TDWI Boston chapter meeting. We had interesting presentation from Jeff Fried of FAST and Dave Mohr of Pentaho who spoke on BI text search and open source software in BI respectively. Many thanks to Fidelity Investments for the terrific meeting room with a fourteenth floor view of Boston Harbor and Logan Airport.

The most fun during the meeting, though, was a lively panel discussion on “Emerging Trends in Business Intelligence”. The panelists: Cliff Longman (CTO, Kalido), Mannie Goldberg (NSTAR), Jeff and Dave. I moderated the panel. Rather than simply having a technology lovefest we tried to keep everyone honest by using the Gartner’s Hype Cycle to frame our discussion. This meant that rather then just hyping the "latest and greatest" technologies, the panelists had to select technologies for all five steps of the Gartner’s Hype Cycle:

1. "Technology Trigger"

2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations"

3. "Trough of Disillusionment"

4. "Slope of Enlightenment"

5. "Plateau of Productivity"

A couple of other ground rules: No vendor could mention their technology in a positive tone, i.e. they were allowed to say its expectations were inflated but not that it was a breakthrough, and they had to come up with something different then their other panelists. I asked the same question to every panelist but had specific follow-up questions and I asked the audience to contribute.

The results according to the panelists & audience:

1. "Technology Trigger"

• BI or Text Search
• Unstructured Data
• Fast Storage
• DW Appliance
• Virtualization
• Operational BI

2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations"

• DW Appliance
• Operational BI
• Mobile BI
• Dashboards
• CPM (Corporate Performance Management)
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• MDM (Master Data Management)
• Virtualization

3. "Trough of Disillusionment"

• CPM (Corporate Performance Management)
• CDI (Customer Data Integration)
• CRM (Customer Resource management)
• Data Governance
• EDW (EnterpriseData Warehouse)
• Business User – This needs explanation! The person meant that vendors continually hype how their software is geared to business people, i.e. self-service, but that it the software’s flexibility and agility is always oriented to IT or business “power” users.

4. "Slope of Enlightenment" or 5. "Plateau of Productivity"

• Data Warehousing Architecture
• OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing)
• Enterprise Reporting
• Relational DBMS (database management system)

I tried not to editorialize during the panel discussion but there were a few times that I could not resist. We did not vote on the list and included each of the panelists’ choices even if many in the audience disagreed. There are a few technologies in multiple categories because opinions vary.

Any thoughts on the choices?

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed by the panel do not necessarily reflect my opinions.