BARC Score – Business Intelligence

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 all the major platform vendors in the BI market, as well as many of the smaller players that often have less visibility but still offer outstanding value to their customers.

Register to download the full BARC Score BI 2016 report here.

Overview

The market for BI tools is highly competitive, with some large international incumbents, many successful vendors with a track record spanning decades, and countless smaller specialists that approach BI challenges from a niche perspective.

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.

Carsten Bange, CEO and Founder of BARC, explains the concept of BARC Score at its launch in 2015:

A modern enterprise BI 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 that wants to succeed in adapting to the digitalization of markets.

A modern enterprise BI platform has to support a broad range of use cases. Therefore it has to 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 platform, organizations should have a proper 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.

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 supply four out of five technologies from the following platform 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. 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 as they don’t charge a license for their products, but an annual subscription fee.