Assessment of the global enterprise business intelligence platforms market
This BARC Score focuses on Enterprise BI Platforms that are able to fulfill a broad set of BI requirements within the enterprise. BARC Score analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the major platform vendors in the BI market, as well as several smaller players that often have less visibility but still offer outstanding value to their customers.
Overview
The market for business intelligence (BI) tools is highly competitive, with some large international incumbents, many successful vendors with a track record spanning decades, and countless smaller specialists with alternative and sometimes disruptive approaches to BI.
This report analyzes the strengths and challenges of the leading vendors that offer beneficial value to customers wanting to implement a ‘modern’ enterprise BI platform.
Characteristics of a modern enterprise BI platform
A modern enterprise BI and analytics platform is able to span traditional and explorative BI and analytics requirements both for standalone data and information applications but also when embedded in operational applications. With the increasing importance of data to not only support management decisions but also increase the efficiency and effectiveness of operational processes – as well as the growing number of products, services and business models being based on data – a modern enterprise BI platform is an indispensable backbone of any enterprise wanting to succeed in adapting to the digitalization of markets.
A modern enterprise BI and analytics platform has to support a broad range of use cases. Therefore, it should provide front-end tools for different types of users based on a suitable infrastructural foundation. The technical infrastructure includes data warehouses and data marts, data integration and data quality components, dictionaries, repositories and many other technologies.
Besides buying a modern enterprise BI and analytics platform, organizations should have a BI strategy that goes well beyond an architecture blueprint to include non-technical and emerging business user-oriented requirements, alignment with corporate strategy, organizational models, outcome-based priority settings and a proper roadmap.
This document will help with the selection process by evaluating the most commonly used product sets from the major vendor community.
Authors: Larissa Seidler, Christian Fuchs, Patrick Keller, Carsten Bange and Robert Tischler
PDF report: € 500
Published: July 2018
Vendors evaluated
| BOARD International | Dimensional Insight |
| Dundas Data Visualization Inc. | IBM |
| Infor (Including BIRST) | Information Builders |
| Microsoft | MicroStrategy |
| OpenText | Oracle |
| Hitachi Vantara (Pentaho) | Pyramid Analytics |
| Qlik | SAP |
| SAS | Sisense |
| Tableau | TARGIT |
| Tibco | Yellowfin |
Selection of vendors
There are two separate inclusion criteria for BARC Score Business Intelligence: the first is associated with a vendor’s products and the other is linked to the financial results relating to those products. To be evaluated in this BARC Score, a vendor has to have a strong focus on providing BI functionality and supply four out of six technologies from the following functional portfolio:
- Formatted and ad hoc reporting
- Dashboards
- Analysis
- Data mining
- Planning
- Self-service BI and data discovery
In addition, the vendor has to generate a minimum of 15 million EUR in license revenue per year with the above product set, spread across at least two separate geographies. Furthermore, the product set must have a significant number of implementations and license revenues across different geographies to be considered as global. As individual geographies we consider:
- Europe, Middle East and Africa
- North America
- Latin America
- Asia/Pacific
Vendors with an open source business model are evaluated by their total revenue because they do not charge a license for their products, but an annual subscription fee.