As part of our research into Actian Action Apps, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with BI users and industry analysts to understand their views on what’s wrong with BI and, specifically, what are the obstacles to wider adoption of BI by business users. We’ve consistently heard the same things over and over:

• BI takes too long to deploy – from identifying a business need through justifying, acquiring, installing, designing, developing, testing and finally deploying a BI project is quite simply too long for most business users
• BI is too slow – the average response time on the average BI database (which, by the way, is only about 7GB *) is over 5 seconds. In these days of instant access, end-users simply don’t want to wait 5 or more seconds
• BI is too hard to put in the hands of business users – the leading tools are too hard to put into the hands of the users so BI remains a specialist discipline often within the IT organization

 These three factors mean that, despite all the claims from the major vendors, BI remains essentially an IT tool; bought, deployed, supported – and priced – like other enterprise level IT products.

 Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. As well are hearing many people gripe about the problems of BI, we also heard many people – even some business users – talk about how successful BI has been for them; how projects can be implemented quickly and easily and how fast performance can be a reality. Many of these users were running Pentaho Business Analytics with Actian’s Vectorwise database so we decided to run a webinar to discuss how BI can be fast and easy even on a limited budget. Please register here to join us on November 17 at 10:00 a.m. PST to find out more.