[3] According to the Aberdeen Group, a large number of companies are rapidly undertaking mobile BI owing to a large number of market pressures such as the need for higher efficiency in business processes, improvement in employee productivity (e.g., time spent looking for information), better and faster decision making, better customer service, and delivery of real-time bi-directional data access to make decisions anytime and anywhere.
Starting in the late 1990s, BI systems offered alternatives for receiving data, including email and mobile devices.
These applications were designed for specific mobile devices, contained minimal amounts of information, and provided no data interactivity.
As a result, the early mobile BI applications were expensive to design and maintain while providing limited informational value, and garnered little interest.
The small screen space, immature mobile browsers, and slow data transmission could not provide a satisfactory BI experience.
[citation needed] Accessibility and bandwidth may be perceived as issues when it comes to mobile technology, but BI solutions provide advanced functionality to predict and outperform such potential challenges.
Mobile BI promises a small report footprint on memory, encryption during transmission as well as on the device, and compressed data storage for offline viewing and use.
BI vendors re-entered the market with offerings spanning different mobile operating systems (BlackBerry, Windows, Symbian) and data access methods.
The two most popular data access options were: Research in Motion is continuing to lose market share to Apple and Android smartphones.
[11] Both devices feature an interactive touchscreen display that is the de facto standard on many mobile phones and tablet computers.
The Google Play Store now has over 700,000 apps available for the mobile devices running the Android operating system.
[12] Google Inc.’s Android has overtaken Apple Inc.’s iOS in the wildly growing arena of app downloads.
Despite popular perception that Microsoft only acknowledges its own existence, recent moves suggest the company is aware that it is not the only player in the technology ecosystem.
The net result is that Microsoft's share of the client platform, be it PC, tablet or smartphone, will likely be reduced to 60% and it could fall below 50%.
For users to benefit from mobile BI, they must be able to navigate dashboard and guided analytics comfortably—or as comfortably as the mobile device will allow, which is where devices with high-resolution screens and touch interfaces (like the iPhone and Android-based phones) have a clear edge over, say, earlier editions of BlackBerry.
Developing a native mobile BI app poses challenges, especially concerning data display rendering and user interactivity.
While custom-coded apps offer near limitless options, the specialized software coding expertise and infrastructure can be expensive to develop, modify, and maintain.
[28] The Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study discovered that security is the number one issue (63%) for organizations.
[30] Transmission security refers to measures that are designed to protect data from unauthorized interception, traffic analysis, and imitative deception.
[32] These measures include Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), iSeries Access for Windows, and virtual private network (VPN) connections.
As data is trafficked beyond the enterprise firewall towards unknown territories, ensuring that it is handled safely is of paramount importance.
Towards this, proper authentication of user connections, centralized access control (like LDAP Directory), encrypted data transfer mechanisms can be implemented.
Business intelligence software platforms need to ensure a secure encrypted keychain for storage of credentials.