The first driver is a maturing user community. In and of itself, this trend doesn’t seem too surprising; as technologies evolve, so do users. Moreover, as data becomes more accessible, the user community evolves to consume and apply that data. In the specific case of data analytics users, though, this maturation appears to be happening at blinding speed.

All across the typical enterprise, people want to get their hands-on data and the insights that can be derived from it. And while the population of users is growing, so is their level of sophistication. A few years back, business users settled for the “queue up and wait” style of analytics. They would review a report, gain a bit of insight based on the historical data, and take their question to a data expert who had the specialized tools, data access, and skill set to help them get to the next level of insight. Then it could (and often did) take days or weeks for the answer to come back,...