This time of the year I like to do some crystal ball gazing on what the year holds for the world of BI - the technologies and the players. As always I follow the Newtonian dictum "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants".
My Big 3 are :
1. "My Shirt Feels....and Speaks ": The first mash-ups of real time information, Big Data Analytics and Wearable electronics emerge. (Think - sales reps getting live prompts on likely prospects when they enter a mall).
2. "Ye specialized BI player, what have you done for me lately which my major IT vendor has not": BI capabilities will increasingly become core functionality of the offerings from major software vendors increasing the pressures on BI players to find new ways to stay relevant. I will not be surprised if by year-end more BI players end up being hyphenated taglines for some major software vendor (deja vu- IBM Cognos et al)
3. "Pay me or else stay away":Some capabilities for monetizing the digital exhaust created by individuals will emerge so that they can track and receive "royalties" for use of the same by corporations; and some of their privacy concerns can be mitigated ("pay me if you want to use my location data or online purchase history ").
Here's what the "Giants" have been saying about the world of BI in 2015:
Prakash Nanduri lays out the following Top 6 predictions in Forbes:
Prediction 1: The lines will blur between data scientists and data analysts
Prediction 2: Microsoft and Salesforce will take a dominant share of the cloud-based business intelligence
Prediction No. 3: Data preparation replaces Big Data as the hottest topic in BI
Prediction 4: Hadoop faces a make-or-break year in the larger enterprise market
Prediction No. 5: Marketing will be the primary driver of BI decisions
Prediction 6: Internet of Things Gets Real for B2B
The experts at techpro and Tableau came up with these 10:

1. Self-service analytics spawns new data governance practices

2. Marketers and sellers turn social intelligence into smarter strategies

3. Analytic competencies emerge across the organization

4. Software user communities will be differentiators

5. Analytics solutions must integrate with other tools in order to become the standard

6. Cloud analytics isn't just for cloud data anymore

7. Conversations with data replace static dashboards

8. Data and journalism complete their merge

9. Mobile analytics mature

10. Deeper analytics capabilities become accessible to non-experts