Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and User Segments
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Andrew Brust
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Business intelligence (BI) is today’s key enabler for analyzing data, deriving business insights from it, and sharing and publicizing those insights within the organization. BI platforms used to be cumbersome and beholden to a waterfall approach of painstaking triage and modeling of data before any analysis could take place. That cautious approach meshed well with corporate conservatism. But it didn’t suit the creation and broad adoption of a now much-sought-after “data culture.” Today’s BI, enterprise or otherwise, must be agile, versatile, frictionless, and–not insignificantly–fun.
If they want to stay competitive, enterprise business intelligence (EBI) platforms must enable and facilitate business users’ self-sufficient exploration and analysis of data, so as to foster inquisitiveness and data-driven thinking. But in enterprise settings, it’s rarely acceptable for business users to do everything. IT, the chief data office, the chief analytics office, and other central bodies must be involved in the acquisition and governance of data. Then, within those constraints of governance, business users must have the agency and autonomy to find the data they need and work with it diligently and tenaciously.
This scenario leaves an almost schizophrenic credo for EBI vendors. They must safeguard the centralized processes and priorities of the organization while enabling the decentralized, unencumbered data discovery and analysis needs of the business.
All of the vendors reviewed in this GigaOm Radar report take this charge quite seriously. These vendors, many of whom are custodians of platforms that have been around for decades, have equal fealty to formalized data acquisition and modeling as to modernizing these platforms, implementing many features that are commonly found in self-service BI (SSBI) platforms. After all, SSBI platforms can be counted among EBI vendors’ competitors.
The vendor platforms we review in this Radar report all succeed at overcoming the challenge before them. They have different fortes, they’ve modernized to different degrees, and they have varying degrees of dependency on trained IT teams and analytics personnel. But all the platforms reviewed here can provide excellent results, maintaining the classic BI rigor they’ve established while enabling the modern requirements brought on by data and BI’s more mainstream priority and popularity.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key EBI vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Business Intelligence Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.