According to Gartner, to achieve effective and safe private cloud computing deployments, security, as it exists in virtualized data centers, needs to evolve and become independent of the physical infrastructure that includes servers, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, Media Access Control (MAC) address and a lot more.

However, it must not be bolted on as an afterthought once companies move from enterprise deployments, to virtualized centers, to private/public cloud.

While the basic components of security in information management remain the same — ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, access and audit of information and workloads — a new, integrated approach to security will be required.

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“Even though growth was nowhere near the levels of 2008, and by no means immune to the recession, BI showed that it is not as cyclical as many other software areas, recording healthy growth in one of the toughest years recorded in software history,” said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner. “The dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and PM front and center of their messaging. Organizations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight would enable cost-cuts and improved productivity and agility. However, there is no doubt pressure has intensified on deal sizes and price points on new sales throughout the year.”

The top five vendors continued to make up most of the market with 71 percent market share. “The large vendors held their own. As IT is consolidating, BI spending often went to a few strategic vendors. However, the application-centric vendors didn’t have the same up-selling momentum as they did in 2008,” said Mr. Sommer.

More here and the full paper can be reached here.

We’re going to focus on three clear areas of innovation. The first — and I’d say this comes closest to being the essence of the conference overall — is about creating a BI strategy that is focused on making decision making a core competency as opposed the just reporting measures. Today we have very IT-centric BI teams that view their job as “let’s get the data right and let’s report to the right users at the right time.” That’s obviously essential and everybody has to be very good at that, but we view that as table stakes. Everyone has to be good at that. The folks that take it up a notch create a BI strategy that’s less IT-centric, more business-centric and more focused on decision making itself.

The second innovation is about emerging technologies and addressing the problem that BI is too hard. All sorts of anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s 15 percent to 20 percent penetration among users and that’s about it. We’re reaching the people who are comfortable with Excel and grids, but we could be giving a lot more people the power to report on and analyze information and make better decisions. One way to do that is with some of the emerging technologies, particularly search and visualization, which have been proven to have mainstream appeal.

The third and final innovation is about the BI market itself. It’s a bit complicated, but it’s focused on integration and the fact that BI has always been overtly disconnected from business processes and applications. Given the market consolidation and the stack centricity of what a lot of these vendors are doing, there’s going to be a much greater focus on integrating BI with an application and process stack. I think that’s going to be very helpful, but there are other aspects to this area of innovation. I think software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing are going to give rise to an array of different types of BI offerings. That’s going to change the market from what it looks like today.

This is and much more including Saas and SOA. Must Read.

In a data-rich world, businesses are inundated with information. Yet used strategically, it can guide decision making and boost performance. That’s why Business Intelligence is on every CIO’s must-have list for 2008 – and why you should attend the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit.

The Gartner BI Summit 2008 is happening next week(Apr 1-3, 2008) at Hyatt Regency Chicago.

The Agenda seems interesting with an impressive list of Keynote speakers like Ian Ayres of the Super Crunchers fame, Howard Dresner of the Performance Management Revolution, the concept that truly inspiring the BI world and the Co-Author of Balanced Scorecard concept, David P. Norton.

I’m looking forward to see the Keynote Videos. Will link them if there are available on the Gartner site. Read More >>