The Forrester Wave Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms q4 2013

8/12/2019 The Forrester Wave Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms q4 2013

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Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USATel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com

The Forrester Wave: EnterpriseBusiness Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013by Boris Evelson, December 18, 2013

For: Application

Development

& Delivery

Professionals

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Best-Of-Breed Versus Suite Is No Longer A Major BI Platform Selection

Criterion

Firms no longer have to make a choice between less expensive, ERP-embedded, butofen inerior BI tools and a best-o-breed BI platorm rom an independent vendor -- a

common conundrum in the past decade. In the modern world, BI platorms can be

embedded into a broader enterprise sofware suite and still be open and best o breed.

Factors Other Than BI Functionality Often Lead BI Platform Selection

Choices

As BI unctionality becomes commoditized, buyers need to look or differentiation

elsewhere in these platorms. Its not just about tool unctionality; tight integration with

enterprise ERP, EL, portal, and desktop office applications can ofen break the tie when

selecting a strategic enterprise BI platorm.

A Single Enterprise BI Platform May Be A Vision But Is Seldom A Practical

Reality

Having 10 different BI platorms may be overkill, but trying to standardize on a single

platorm brings diminishing returns. Large organizations will likely settle on at least

three platorms: a broad, scalable enterprise suite; BI embedded in ERP, CRM, and

financial sofware packages; and lightweight desktop sel-service tools or business users.
http://www.forrester.com/


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purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS

WHY READ THIS REPORT

In Forresters 72-criteria evaluation o enterprise business intelligence (BI) platorm vendors, we

identified the 11 most significant sofware providers Actuate, IBM, Inormation Builders, Microsof,

MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlikech, SAP, SAS, ableau Sofware, and ibco Sofware in the category and

researched, analyzed, and scored them. Tis report details our findings about how well each vendor ulfills

our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help application development and delivery

proessionals select the right partner or their enterprise BI platorms.

Table Of Contents

Industry Leaders Compete On Information

The BI Software Market Is Becoming More

Crowded Every Year

True Vendor Differentiation Lies In The Details

Enterprise BI Platform Evaluation Overview

Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering,

Strategy, And Market Presence

Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To

Support BI In Complex Organizations

BI Is A Buyers Market That Offers Plenty Of

Choices

Vendor Profiles

Leaders

Strong Performers

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester conducted product evaluations in

September 2013, interviewed 10 vendors,

and surveyed 94 user companies.

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The Forrester Wave: Enterprise BusinessIntelligence Platforms, Q4 2013The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Boris Evelson

with Holger Kisker, Ph.D., Martha Bennett, and Nasry Angel

2

7

10

12

17

DECEMBER 18, 2013
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The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 2

2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013

INDUSTRY LEADERS COMPETE ON INFORMATION

Te majority o large organizations have either already shifed away rom using BI as just another back-

office process and toward competing on BI-enabled inormation or are in the process o doing so.

Businesses can no longer compete just on the cost, margins, or quality o their products and services in

an increasingly commoditized global economy. wo kinds o companies will ultimately be more

successul, prosperous, and profitable: 1) those with richer, more accurate inormation about their

customers and products than their competitors and 2) those that have the same quality o inormation

as their competitors but get it sooner. Forresters Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence

And Big Data, Q4 2012 survey showed that enterprises that invest more in BI have higher growth.

The BI Software Market Is Becoming More Crowded Every Year

Te sofware industry recognized this trend decades ago, resulting in a market swarming with

startups that appeared and (very ofen) ound success aster than large vendors could acquire them.Te market is still jam-packed and includes multiple dynamics:

All ERP and sofware stack vendors offer leading BI platorms . . .Stack or suite versusbest o breed is no longer a consideration. All large sofware stack and enterprise resource

planning (ERP) vendors have either built or acquired market-leading BI platorms. Te pace

o acquisition has not slowed: In the past ew years, Oracle has acquired Endeca, SAP acquired

KXEN, and IBM acquired i2, Te Now Factory, Star Analytics, and StoredIQ. Forrsights data

indicates that these three stack vendors, along with Microsof, are currently the most popular BI

choices or companies.

. . . but theres also plenty o room or independent BI vendors. I your sourcing and vendormanagement policy calls or diversification and less dependence on a single vendor, rest easy

you have abundant options. SAS and Inormation Builders deliver one-stop BI shopping and offer

not just BI, but also most o the data management platorms and tools. Actuate and MicroStrategy

offer reporting and analytics platorms that can scale to the needs o large enterprises. Panorama

Sofware, Qlikech, ableau Sofware, and ibco Sofware provide differentiated, highly visual,

intuitive analytics oriented toward business users. Forrester clients are taking notice: ableau and

Qlikech rank among the top five vendors mentioned in the BI-related inquiries that weve fielded

in the past 12 months (see Figure 1).

Departmental desktop BI tools aimed at business users are scaling up.Panorama Sofware,Qlikech, ableau Sofware, and ibco Sofware started out by offering departmental desktop-

based technologies that appealed to business users due to their ease o use and lesser reliance

on enterprise I support. While that appeal is still there, these vendors are now going afer

large enterprises with eatures that challenge larger vendors in terms o scalability, security,

rich metadata, internationalization, application programming interaces (APIs), and other

industrial-strength enterprise eatures.


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Enterprise BI platorm vendors are going afer sel-service use cases.Large enterprise BIplatorm vendors arent sitting on their laurels; theyre prioritizing investments in sel-service,

in-memory, desktop, and cloud products that appeal to business users. Because these tools are

part o larger, more complete enterprise BI platorms, vendors ofen give them away or ree; or

example, you get IBM Cognos Insight i you have Cognos 10 enterprise licenses, SAP Lumira i

you buy the BusinessObjects BI suite, or the sel-service BI eatures in Microsof Excel 2013 like

Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, and Power Query i you have Microsof Office 2013 or

SharePoint 2010. Tese vendors have an additional advantage: I can migrate sel-provisioned

BI applications to their more scalable platorm. Tis puts a lot o pressure on the vendors in the

departmental category.

Cloud offers options to organizations that would rather not deal with BI stack complexity.Got data, want inormation, but dont want to deal with installation, configuration, integration,

tuning, optimization, maintenance, and support? Large vendors such as Actuate, Microsof,MicroStrategy, SAP, ableau Sofware, and ibco Sofware and native cloud BI vendors like Birst,

Bime, and GoodData offer very attractive choices or such use cases.

Hadoop is breathing new lie into open source BI.Open source BI tools have been aroundor years, but big data and Hadoop are now re-energizing these products. I you have limited

budget, want to reduce your dependence on commercial sofware vendors, and want to

leverage the expertise o millions o sofware developers around the world, look to Actuate

BIR, Jaspersof, Pentaho, and SpagoBI. Large BI systems integrators (SIs) are also responding

to clients demands to reduce their dependence on commercial code and vendors and have

recently started building open source BI solutions or clients such as Luxofs Horizon data

visualization platorm.

Sel-service BI takes on a new meaning.Business users are no longer satisfied with justdiscovering and analyzing data; theyre also asking or the ability to perorm basic data

manipulation tasks like integration, matching, and deduplication without having to wait or

enterprise batch extract-transorm-load (EL) and data cleansing cycles. SAP built these

eatures into Lumira; Actuate acquired unctionality rom Quiterian that it now offers as BIR

Analytics; and ableau Sofware and Qlikech partner with Paxata. Alteryx, Microsof (via the

BI eatures in Excel 2013), and Prognoz also support this use case out o the box.

Te line between BI sofware and services is blurring.Leading consultants and SIs are ridingthe BI wave, getting into BI outsourcing deals where they take on the burden o managing a

clients data and providing inormation-as-a-service, ofen hiding architecture and sofware

complexities rom the client.1


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Te BI use cases and vendors cited above dont even come close to comprising a complete list.

Other use cases include lightweight BI platorms that lend themselves to embedding into other

applications, prebuilt components that can be quickly assembled into use case-specific BI apps, and

extracting data rom exotic data sources such as mainrame reports. Other vendors in the spaceinclude arcplan, Bitam, Board International, Datawatch, Dimensional Insight, InetSof echnology,

JackBe (Sofware AG), Jinonet Sofware, Logi Analytics, Looker, Rocket Sofware, Salient

Management, SiSense, argit, reasure Data, and Yellowfin.

Figure 1How Organizations Use And Inquire About Leading BI Vendors

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.108103

*Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012

Base: 634 IT executives and technology decision-makers(multiple responses accepted)

Rank in the

number of

BI inquiries

Which vendors BI tools do you currently use?*SAP 1

Microsoft 2 (tie)

Tableau Software 2 (tie)

Oracle 4

QlikTech 5

IBM 6

MicroStrategy 7

SAS 8

Actuate 9

Information Builders

SAP

Microsoft

Tableau Software

Tibco Software

Oracle

QlikTech

IBM

MicroStrategy

SAS

Actuate


36%

55%

5%

4%

45%

6%

31%

9%

14%

4%

4%10

Tibco Software 11

Base: BI-related inquiries by Forresterclients over the past 12 months


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Predictive analytics.Predictive analytics represent any solution that supports the identificationo meaningul patterns and correlations among variables in complex, structured, unstructured,

historical, and potential uture data sets or the purposes o predicting events and assessing

the attractiveness o various courses o action. When evaluating BI vendor predictive analytics

capabilities, look or aspects like how many routines come out o the box, how tightly theyre

integrated with the rest o the BI platorm, and whether the vendor integrates open source R.5

Reporting and querying.Tis includes analytical reporting based on a data warehouse(DW) or data mart and operational reporting based on an operational database management

system. Reporting tools ofen include pixel-perect positioning o data and graphics, a scripting

language equal in power to a ull programming language, and the ability to handle complex

headers, ooters, nested subtotals, and multiple report bands on a single page. Ad hoc query

tools provide quick answers to business questions. When evaluating BI platorm reporting

capabilities, look or eatures like report ormatting (including conditional ormatting), profile-based customization, grouping, ranking, sorting, filtering, and expanding and collapsing reports.

We also looked at the inormation delivery capabilities o these tools, such as:

Embedded BI.Embedded reporting, analytics, and dashboards are purpose-built analyticscapabilities that are embedded into other business applications, such as ERP, CRM, and supply

chain management (SCM), either natively, via a sofware development kit or API, or via service-

oriented architecture (SOA) or web services.

Integration with Microsof Office applications.While all leading BI platorms integrate with

Microsof Word, PowerPoint (or documents and presentations that use live data), and Excel(or viewing secure and trusted corporate data), very ew provide tight integration with email

beyond emailing reports or report URLs. Organizations can embed BI dashboards into an email

application or example, by creating another panel in Outlook similar to its existing mail,

calendar, and task panels. Further customizations make the data more actionable; or example,

an email rom a certain customer could proactively expose a dashboard about that customer.

Portal integration.Portals may serve as a single access point to catalog and index, classiy,and search or BI objects such as dashboards and reports. Most BI platorms come with their

own portals, but organizing multiple BI applications based on different platorms under one

portal umbrella requires legwork. Organizations can apply enterprise portal standards to all BI

applications and expose all BI metadata to the portal search engine to allow users to search or

all BI content rom a single point.

Tick and thin clients.Tese include native desktop and mobile device client applications,applications accessible via any Internet browser, and rich Internet applications that use

standards like HML5.


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Other report and dashboard dissemination capabilities.Even though interactive desktop andmobile BI applications are becoming more popular, many organizations still need to schedule

batch reports and deliver them automatically to multiple devices via email, electronic data

interchange, and other electronic ormats.

And we didnt orget to evaluate the integration o BI tools with oundational, supporting

components such as:

Applications.Look or the number o hooks (APIs) into various programming languages thatyou can use to customize or execute platorm unctions. Tis is key or embedded BI, white-

labeled BI applications, and the integration o BI with any other platorms.

Data.Most BI platorms come with basic data integration (EL) unctionality. Beyond that,

look or certified integration with leading data integration platorms.

6

Contextual services.BI output is only as good as the source data. Look or certified integrationwith data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) platorms.

echnical architecture.Last but not least, consider technical architecture eatures such as 64-bit architectures, client and server platorms, application server support, SOA certification, and

eatures needed to scale up and out.

Te detailed list o BI platorm capabilities and eatures is much, much longer. As part o the research

conducted or this Forrester Wave, Forrester collected more than 300 data points rom each vendor

and consolidated them into 72 criteria. We used those criteria to evaluate, score, and rank the vendors.

ENTERPRISE BI PLATFORM EVALUATION OVERVIEW

o assess the state o the market or enterprise business intelligence platorms and see how the vendors

stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses o top BI vendors.

Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence

Afer examining past research, user needs assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we

developed a comprehensive set o evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 72 criteria,

which we grouped into three high-level buckets:

Current offering.We assessed each vendors current offering by considering all o the eaturesand capabilities reviewed above. We also evaluated a short demonstration by each vendor o its

key capabilities and surveyed a total o 94 o the vendors customers.


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Strategy.We reviewed each vendors strategy and considered how well each vendors plansor product enhancement position it to meet uture customer demands. We also looked at

the financial and human resources the company has available to support its strategy and each

vendors go-to-market pricing and licensing strategy.

Market presence.o establish a products market presence, we combined inormation abouteach vendors financial perormance, installed customer base, and number o employees across

major geographical regions with inormation about its partnership ecosystem and its horizontal

and vertical industry applications.

Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To Support BI In Complex Organizations

Forrester included 11 vendors in the assessment: Actuate, IBM, Inormation Builders, Microsof,

MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlikech, SAP, SAS, ableau Sofware, and ibco Sofware. Oracle wasincluded as a nonparticipating vendor. Each o these vendors has (see Figure 2):

A complete, sel-contained, ully unctional BI platorm development environment.Weocused on BI tools not technologically or unctionally tied or limited to particular unctional

or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. Tese tools must be complete, sel-contained BI

environments or platorms that do not necessarily have to be embedded into other applications.

Te ability to query databases using SQL and MDX.While other querying technologies, suchas XQuery and DMX, are available and NoSQL data architecture is on the rise or certain BI use

cases, SQL and MDX are the database query technologies most widely used in large enterprises.

Sufficient market presence and interest rom Forrester clients.We included the top 11vendors by BI revenue that also had at least 100 in-production customers and were present in

more than one major geographical region. We also ocused on vendors that Forrester clients

requently mentioned or asked about in the context o BI (measured as more than 25 inquiries

over the past 12 months).


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Figure 2Evaluated Vendors: Product Inormation And Selection Criteria (Cont.)

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Vendor selection criteria

At least three of the four major functional BI components that Forrester believes are critical for largeenterprise BI environments: production and operational reporting, ad hoc querying, OLAP, anddashboards.

The ability to query databases using SQL and MDX. While other querying technologies such asXQuery and DMX are available, SQL and MDX are used most widely in large enterprises.

A complete, self-contained, fully functioning BI environment that is not technologically or functionallytied or limited to particular functional or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. To be considered, atool must be a complete, self-contained BI environment or platform that does not have to beembedded in other applications.

Significant market presence: at least 100 in-production customers present in more than one majorgeographical region and more than 10% of which are enterprise-grade installations that cross lines of

business and have more than 100 users.

Frequent interest from Forrester clients in the form of questions about or mentions of a vendor in thecontext of inquiries about BI.

One of the top 11 vendors by BI revenues.

All products needed to be generally available by December 2013.

BI IS A BUYERS MARKET THAT OFFERS PLENTY OF CHOICES

Te evaluation uncovered a continuously evolving market in which (see Figure 3):

SAP, IBM, SAS, Microsof, Oracle, Inormation Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate leadthe pack.While many BI platorm eatures are becoming commoditized, its not the individual

capabilities that differentiate the Leaders, but rather the completeness, comprehensiveness, and

integration o the entire BI architectural stack. In addition to increasingly popular eatures

like analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, the Leaders also provide

the pixel-perect, industrial-strength report writers that companies still need.7While many o

the Leaders appear to be closely grouped, each o them differentiates itsel in terms o specific

individual capabilities, such as high scalability and tight integration with EL, MDM, business

perormance solutions, portals, and other highly relevant data management and inormationdelivery components. I one o our Leaders is already your enterprises preerred BI platorm

provider, there may be little or no reason to look elsewhere or another specialized BI tool.


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ibco Sofware, Qlikech, and ableau Sofware offer highly competitive and differentiatedoptions.Vendors in the Leaders category can by no means rest easy: the Strong Perormers are

hot on their heels, especially where the main use case calls or business user sel-service and

highly visual and intuitive analytics. In many specialized situations, these vendors can even

outshine and outperorm the Leaders. ibco Spotfire leads the market in highly visual streaming

analytics and business activity monitoring, tightly integrating it with process workflows, rules,

and advanced analytics to help enable the modern real-time enterprise. QlikView is hard to beat

in intuitive and spontaneous data exploration and discovery, providing a unique solution to the

age-old BI challenge You dont know what you dont know. ableau Sofwares differentiation

goes well beyond technology: Its platorm embeds most o the best practices that address the

human psychology o visual perception to produce the most intuitive visualizations.

Tis evaluation o the enterprise BI platorm market is intended to be a starting point only. We

encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit theirindividual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.

Figure 3Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platorms, Q4 13


Go online to download

the Forrester Wave tool

for more detailedproduct evaluations,

feature comparisons,

and customizable

rankings.

RiskyBets Contenders Leaders

StrongPerformers

StrategyWeak Strong

Currentoffering

Weak

Strong

Market presence

Full vendor participation

Incomplete vendor participation

Microsoft

SAP

Tableau Software

QlikTech

Tibco Software

Micro-Strategy

Oracle

Actuate


SAS

IBM


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Figure 3Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platorms, Q4 13 (Cont.)


Actuate

IBMInformationBuilders

Microsoft

MicroStrategy

QlikTech

SAP

SAS

CURRENT OFFERING

Architecture

Development environment

Functions

Operational

STRATEGY Commitment

Pricing

Transparency

Product direction

MARKET PRESENCE

Company financials

Global presence and install base

Partnership ecosystem

Functional applications

3.84

3.95

4.45

3.64

4.20

3.583.40

3.50

3.00

4.40

1.99

1.00

3.20

1.00

1.00

Forresters

Weighting

50%

20%

10%

60%

10%

50%75%

0%

5%

20%

0%

40%

45%

10%

5%

4.48

4.33

4.00

4.53

5.00

4.554.70

3.80

2.00

4.60

4.43

3.80

4.80

5.00

5.00

4.29

4.16

4.55

4.34

4.00

3.673.40

3.60

4.00

4.60

2.44

2.00

3.20

1.00

2.00

3.87

3.80

4.00

3.91

3.60

4.634.70

3.60

4.00

4.50

4.39

4.20

4.80

5.00

1.00

3.75

3.88

2.65

3.85

4.00

4.114.10

2.60

3.00

4.40

2.88

2.20

4.10

1.00

1.00

3.41

3.11

4.45

3.36

3.30

2.752.30

4.00

4.00

4.10

3.24

2.80

3.70

3.00

3.00

4.46

4.42

4.45

4.47

4.50

4.614.70

2.70

2.00

4.90

4.52

3.80

5.00

5.00

5.00

4.35

3.86

4.90

4.50

3.90

4.224.20

1.80

3.00

4.60

3.61

3.40

4.00

2.00

5.00

TableauSoftware

TibcoSoftware

3.16

3.30

2.20

3.27

3.20

3.002.60

3.50

3.00

4.50

2.81

2.60

3.60

1.00

1.00

3.63

3.63

3.00

3.78

3.40

2.712.30

3.60

2.00

4.40

2.69

1.40

4.40

1.00

1.00

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

VENDOR PROFILES

Leaders

SAP leads the market with broad BI innovations.Whether its SAP HANA or low latency, agile,and in-memory analytics; Lumira or business user sel-service; or Crystal or scalable, mission-

critical reports, SAPs philosophy and strategy o the best tool or each job delivers on its

promise. Firms engage with SAP on BI to benefit rom one-stop shopping or data management

(EL, MDM, DW, and DQ), BI products including the HANA appliance, and SAPs expertisewith business domain and industry vertical applications based on its ERP experience. Forrester

ound that SAP BusinessObjects had excellent capabilities in analytics, BI customization via a

rich set o APIs, data integration, inormation delivery, MDM, perormance management,

reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical architecture. SAP customers particularly

praised BusinessObjects data integration, inormation delivery technical architecture, analytics,


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operational capabilities, and SAPs corporate and product vision. SAP is the vendor that Forrester

clients ask about most ofen in BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 36% o companies

use SAP or BI. One concern that we ofen hear about BusinessObjects is that innovation and

unctional richness sometimes trump product-to-product integration; customers still are acedwith multiple UIs and cannot reuse some objects across products.

IBM dwars its competitors in the breadth and completeness o BI capabilities.I youwant a single source to meet all your BI needs, and i those needs include sofware, hardware

(including mainrames), and proessional services, no vendor can ully compete with IBM.

Clients know that they can rely on IBM Cognos because, unlike some o its competitors, IBM

puts a high priority on integration and stability, even at the expense o sometimes being late

to the market with certain capabilities, such as cloud BI sofware-as-a-service. Forrester ound

that IBM Cognos had excellent capabilities in analytics, data integration, inormation delivery,

MDM, perormance management, reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical

architecture. IBM customers particularly praised Cognos analytics, perormance management,

operational capabilities, reporting and querying, and technical architecture and IBMs corporate

and product vision. IBM accounts or the sixth highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent

survey data indicates that 31% o companies use Cognos or BI.

SAS isnt just about analytics it also provides an enterprise-grade BI platorm.Althoughfirms have known SAS as a leader in advanced and predictive analytics or years, dont overlook

the act that it also has a ormidable BI platorm. Firms engage with SAS on BI to benefit rom

one-stop shopping or data management (EL, MDM, and DQ), BI products including SAS

analytics appliances, expertise with business domain and industry vertical applications, and data

management proessional services. Using SAS BI can also help clients reduce their dependenceon a single sofware vendor. Forrester ound that SAS BI had excellent capabilities in data

integration, supported query languages, scalability, internationalization, BI customization with

a rich set o APIs, analytics, MDM, perormance management, and reporting and querying. SAS

customers particularly praised its data integration, inormation delivery, technical architecture,

analytics, operational capabilities, and corporate and product vision. SAS accounts or the

eighth highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 14% o

companies use SAS or BI. Concerns about SAS BI include a lack o pricing transparency and a

ailure to offer perpetual licenses.

Microsof delivers a leading BI platorm with a amiliar Excel interace.Even i youvestandardized on other BI tools, you probably use, or at least have, Microsof BI components like

SQL Server, SharePoint, and Excel so Microsof BI should be on your shortlist. Microsofs

BI stack provides all o the necessary capabilities to support managed BI sel-service. Business

users create BI content in their own sandboxes via the BI eatures in Excel 2013 and the

cloud-based Power BI, which Microsof recently released into public preview and collaborate

and share BI content via SharePoint. Tis allows I to productionalize what users create and


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share; or example, a Power Pivot model saved to SharePoint becomes an Analysis Services

cube that I can productionalize with robust EL and an enterprise-grade UI. Forrester ound

that Microsof BI had excellent capabilities in query languages, availability o BI appliances,

internationalization, customization via a rich set o APIs, MDM, and reporting and querying.Microsof customers particularly praised the vendors data integration capabilities. Microsof

tied or the second-highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that

55% o companies use Microsof or BI. Concerns include the Microsof centricity o the BI

platorm it requires SQL Server, SharePoint, and Office) and its heavy reliance on partners

or implementation and systems integration services.

Oracle supports the only plug-and-play BI or complex ERP environments.Te latest versionso Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Oracle BI Applications, as well as the Fusion

versions o Oracle ERP, have one thing in common: a single metadata layer called the common

enterprise inormation model (CEIM). In an all-Oracle environment, merely installing the three

platorms delivers instant operational and analytical BI, with reporting directly out o ERP. CEIM

also acilitates actionable BI, whereby firms can take actions such as updating the transactional

applications (ERP, CRM) with little to no coding. Te recent acquisition o Endeca gives Oracle

BI additional capabilities to analyze and explore (using aceted navigation) hierarchical data that

doesnt fit into traditional relational or multidimensional structures, such as product data with

complex, ragged, uneven, or unbalanced hierarchies. Oracle packages OBIEE, Endeca, Essbase,

and the imesen database with the Exalytics appliance; customers have a choice o relational,

multidimensional, hierarchical, and in-memory databases covering most BI use cases. Oracle

accounts or the ourth highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that

45% o companies use Oracle or BI. Concerns include a lack o desktop sel-service BI tools and

the paucity o citable clients using OBIEE in heterogeneous non-Oracle environments.

Inormation Builders can step in at any time with a platorm to support all BI needs.I youwant to reduce your dependence on ERP and sofware stack vendors; need an integrated BI

platorm that includes EL, DQ, and MDM; have exotic data sources, including mainrame;

and really need a BI platorm that can scale, Inormation Builders WebFocus is a top choice.

Forrester ound that WebFocus had excellent data integration, inormation delivery, overall

technical architecture, scalability, analytics, MDM, perormance management, reporting and

querying, and operational capabilities. WebFocus customers particularly praised its data access,

technical architecture, analytics, perormance management, reporting and querying, and

operational capabilities and the vendors corporate and product vision. Inormation Builders

accounts or the 10th highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that

4% o companies use it or BI. Concerns include lack o desktop based sel-service BI tools and

the act that WebFocus is based on Inormation Builders 4GL Focus programming language.

While Focus has a 30-year, battle-tested history o handling very large data sets, some clients

are concerned that they will need to supplement the WebFocus GUI with good old-ashioned

coding in Focus or especially complex programming tasks.


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MicroStrategy shines with seamless architecture and a top mobile BI platorm.MicroStrategyhas grown organically and architected its entire suite as a single platorm. Forrester clients find

that, afer making the initial investment and effort in MicroStrategy, the reusability o all objects

and the relational OLAP engine with drill-anywhere capability ofen result in a lower long-term

total cost o ownership. Weve also seen clients having the most success with enterprise-scalable

mobile BI applications delivered on the MicroStrategy platorm. Forrester ound that

MicroStrategy had excellent mobile inormation delivery, scalability, integrated metadata, and

reporting and querying unctionality. MicroStrategy customers particularly praised the vendors

data access, inormation delivery, reporting and querying, operational capabilities, and corporate

and product vision. MicroStrategy accounts or the seventh highest number o Forrester BI

inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 9% o companies use it or BI. Concerns include its

high reliance on a largely disappearing network o partners, many o which have been acquired,

or architectural components like EL, DQ, and MDM.

Actuate is a top choice or scaling to millions o reports and users.Massive scalability interactive reporting applications producing output consumed by millions, not just thousands,

o users is Actuates sweet spot. Its top use cases involve distributing complex, interactive

online statements to customers o large financial services institutions. Te Eclipse Foundations

BIR, the basis o Actuates platorm, is used by more than 3 million developers and is open

source so it lends itsel nicely to embedded BI and try-beore-you-buy use cases. In 2013,

Actuate closed one o the gaps in its portolio, business user sel-service analytics, by acquiring

Quiterian. Forrester ound that Actuate had excellent data access, inormation delivery,

scalability, integrated development environment (IDE), BI knowledge management, and

reporting and querying capabilities. Actuate accounts or the ninth highest number o Forrester

BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% o companies use Actuate or BI. Concernsinclude its high reliance on a largely disappearing network o partners, many o which have

been acquired, or architectural components like EL, DQ, and MDM.

Strong Performers

ibco Sofware excels in intuitive and interactive data visualizations and advanced analytics.ibco Spotfire is the space shuttle o in-memory analytics and advanced data visualization,

embedding more predictive analytical routines than its closest competitors. Spotfire also tightly

integrates with ibcos data, process, rule, and event management sofware including the

recently acquired StreamBase or real-time analytics, which includes advanced complex event

processing and business activity monitoring capabilities. Although Spotfires roots are in

deployments targeting power analysts and data scientists, today many organizations implement it

or all types o knowledge workers, rom casual users to mobile executives. Forrester ound that

ibco Spotfire had excellent integration with process workflow and rules engines, cloud offerings,

analytics, data visualization, and MDM capabilities. ibco accounts or the 11th highest number

o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% o companies use Spotfire or BI.


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Spotfire supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,

and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perect reporting so customers ofen deploy

Spotfire in addition to, not instead o, a broader enterprise BI platorm rom another vendor.

Qlikech still shines with its unique, differentiated in-memory sel-service data exploration.Data visualization is a hot buzzword these days, but its no panacea. Most data visualization

tools rely on underlying relational or multidimensional data models, limiting them to answering

questions prebuilt into the data models. QlikView breaks through such barriers with associative

data architecture that exposes any-to-any relationships between entities and attributes. Business

users can explore these relationships, and uncover previously unknown inormation, just by

typing in a ew keywords. Forrester ound that QlikView had excellent capabilities in IDE

and collaborative BI. Qlikech customers particularly praised QlikViews data access, data

integration, overall technical architecture, and analytics and Qlikechs corporate and product

vision. Qlikech accounts or the fifh highest number o Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey

data indicates that 6% o companies use QlikView or BI. QlikView supports most enterprise

BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, but does

not support pixel-perect reporting so customers ofen deploy QlikView in addition to, not

instead o, a broader enterprise BI platorm rom another vendor.

ableau Sofware is moving to disrupt the BI market with highly intuitive data visualization. Building effective data visualization requires much more than just technology. Very ew business

analysts have a background in data visualization best practices to answer questions like: Is a data

set best visualized using a scatter plot or a bar graph? How many different colors should a single

graph use? Can we put two graphs with different scales next to each other on a single dashboard?

ableau can answer these and many other questions about best practices based on the psychologyo human visual perception. Its GUI and library o white papers clearly shows that this is

ableaus specialty. Forrester ound that ableau had excellent data visualization and Hadoop

integration capabilities. ableau customers particularly praised the data access, inormation

delivery, overall technical architecture, metadata architecture, sel-service BI, and operational

capabilities and the vendors corporate and product vision. ableau tied or the second-highest

number o Forrester BI inquiries a real eat or a vendor that wasnt even on our radar screen

until just a ew years ago. Recent survey data indicates that 5% o companies use ableau or BI.

ableau supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,

and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perect reporting so customers ofen deploy

ableau in addition to, not instead o, a broader enterprise BI platorm rom another vendor.


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SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Online Resource

Te online version o Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed

product evaluations and customizable rankings.

Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave

Forrester used a combination o three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses o each

solution:

Vendor surveys.Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluationcriteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where

necessary to gather details o vendor qualifications.

Product demos.We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations o their products unctionality. Weused findings rom these product demos to validate details o each vendors product capabilities.

Customer reerence surveys.o validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester alsoconducted surveys with 94 o the vendors current customers.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

We conduct primary research to develop a list o vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated

in this market. From that initial pool o vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose thesevendors based on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate

vendors that have limited customer reerences and products that dont fit the scope o our evaluation.

Afer examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop

the initial evaluation criteria. o evaluate the vendors and their products against our set o criteria, we

gather details o product qualifications through a combination o lab evaluations, questionnaires,

demos, and/or discussions with client reerences. We send evaluations to the vendors or their review,

and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view o vendor offerings and strategies.

We set deault weightings to reflect our analysis o the needs o large user companies and/or

other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document and then score the vendors based

on a clearly defined scale. Tese deault weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we

encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based

tool. Te final scores generate the graphical depiction o the market based on current offering,

strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product


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capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more inormation on the methodology that every

Forrester Wave evaluation ollows, go to http://www.orrester.com/marketing/policies/orrester-

wave-methodology.html.

Integrity Policy

All o Forresters research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, is conducted according to our

integrity policy. For more inormation, go to http://www.orrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-

policy.html.

Forrsights For Business Technology

Forresters Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012 was fielded

to 634 I executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the

UK, and the US rom small and medium-size business (SMB) and enterprise companies with 100

or more employees. All respondents reported working or companies that were currently using or

planning to use business intelligence (BI) technologies. Tis survey is part o Forresters Forrsights

or Business echnology and was fielded during October 2012 and November 2012. Survey

respondent incentives included gif certificates and research reports.

Each calendar year, Forresters Forrsights or Business echnology fields business-to-business

technology studies in more than 17 countries spanning North America, Latin America, Europe,

and developed and emerging Asia. For quality control, we careully screen respondents according

to job title and unction. Forresters Forrsights or Business echnology ensures that the final

survey population contains only those with significant involvement in the planning, unding, andpurchasing o I products and services. Additionally, we set quotas or company size (number

o employees) and industry as a means o controlling the data distribution. Forrsights uses only

superior data sources and advanced data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.

ENDNOTES

1 Sel-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-riendly or intuitive interaces. o learn how to maximize

your return on BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, he Forrester Wave: Sel-Service Business

Intelligence Platorms, Q2 2012 report.

2

Continued economic uncertainty and major industry-changing dynamics like mobility and the shif todigital business put a premium on data and inormation to acilitate strategic decision-making. Meanwhile,

the potential to mine and analyze vast quantities o data is transorming activities across the value chain.

Whether its optimizing the customer experience via social media or improving logistics by embedding

sensors in vehicles, data analysis is simply critical. o learn what capabilities are available and which will

best suit your organizations needs, see the July 11, 2013, echRadar: BI Analytics, Q3 2013 report.
http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES77141http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES77141http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902


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3 Enterprises find ADV platorms to be essential tools that enable them to monitor business, find patterns,

and take action to avoid threats and snatch opportunities. See the July 17, 2012, he Forrester Wave:

Advanced Data Visualization (ADV) Platorms, Q3 2012 report.

4 Sel-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-riendly or intuitive interaces. o maximize your return on

BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, he Forrester Wave: Sel-Service Business Intelligence Platorms, Q2

2012 report.

5 Predictive analytics enables firms to reduce risks, make intelligent decisions, and create differentiated,

more personal customer experiences. But predictive analytics is hard to do without the right tools and

technologies, given the increasing challenge o storing, processing, and accessing the volume, velocity,

and variety o big data. In order to navigate the complex technology landscape, which will lead your

organization into the uture o data advantage, see the January 3, 2013, he Forrester Wave: Big Data

Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q1 2013 report.

6

For more on EL, reer to Forresters 60-criteria evaluation o enterprise EL vendors. See the February 27,2012, he Forrester Wave: Enterprise EL, Q1 2012 report.

7 Reporting is still No. 1 on users priority lists or adoption, with 81% implementations in firms business

units. Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012.
http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71903http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71903http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES85601http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES85601http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES59511http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES59511http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES85601http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES85601http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71903http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES71903


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Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to

global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 13 key roles at major companies providing proprietary

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