Post date: 26-Feb-2014 02:26:47
Magic Quadrand Comparison for 2014 and 2013.
Refer to Original articlehere.
On the above Magic Quadrant, Gartner defines BI and analytics as a software platform that delivers 17 capabilities across three categories:
1. Information Delivery
2. Analysis
3. Integration
On this article, we’ll be looking at the top leaders in the current 2014 BI market.
1. Tableau
Tableau’s highly intuitive, visual-based data discovery, dashboarding, and data mashup capabilities have transformed business users’ expectations about what they can discover in data and share without extensive skills or training with a BI platform.
Strengths
- High rate for intuitive, visual-based interactive data exploration experience. Competitors, large and small, try to imitate. Customers remain extremely happy with Tableau (for the fourth year in a row). Mainly for:
- Core differentiator — making a range of types of analysis (from simple to complex) accessible and easy for the ordinary business user, whom Tableau effectively transforms into a “data superhero.”
- Market Understanding on meeting dominant and mainstream buying requirements for ease of use, breadth of use and enabling business users to perform more complex types of analysis without extensive skills or IT assistance
- Competitive differentiation continues to increase its momentum, even though it operates in an increasingly crowded market in which most other vendors view it as a target. The company’s initial public offering in 2013 provided the resources to enable it to fulfill more of its product and market expansion plans.
- Focused vision with an evolutionary road map for enabling users to meet enterprise requirements for reusability, scalability and embeddability. Consistent strong results on key product satisfaction and customer experience measures, combined with high growth, put it in a good position to keep gaining market share and traction in the market’s unoccupied space, in increasingly large enterprise deployments (buyers increasingly demand both enterprise and discovery and visualization capabilities from their BI platforms). Customer satisfaction is strong, coupled with its market momentum, are behind its dominant Ability to Execute position. Main reasons for choosing Tableau is the ease of use for end users and developers, and functionality( 73% selected Tableau for its ease of use for end users, which places it among the top two vendors in the survey). A high percentage of users also chose its platform for low cost to implement; Tableau customers reported one of the lowest implementation costs per user of any vendor in the survey. Moreover, Tableau earned one of the top aggregate, weighted average product scores (even when adjusted for enterprise deployments); above-average ratings for reporting and ad hoc query; and a ranking of No. 1 or No. 2 for dashboards, business user data mashup, geospatial intelligence, mobile and interactive visualization capabilities; it also has one of the highest percentages of users actively deploying mobile BI. Its latest release (Tableau 8.1) adds R integration and prediction bands to existing forecasting capabilities. Future releases are more business-user-oriented, and advanced analytics, which should add to the types of analysis users can conduct without advanced analytic skills.
- Direct query access has been a strength of the platform since the product’s inception. It provides purpose-built, business-oriented data mashup capabilities with data connectors that use Tableau’s VizQL technology. Customers report average deployment sizes in terms of users, with data volumes among the best in the survey as a result of Tableau’s direct query access. Tableau offers a broad range of support for direct-query SQL and MDX data sources, also a number of Hadoop distributions, native support for Google BigQuery, and support for search-based data discovery platforms, such as Attivio. Tableau’s columnar, in-memory data engine, which can be used as an alternative to, or in, hybrid mode with its direct query access, enables fast performance on large and multisource datasets and on complex queries, such as very large multidimensional filters.
- Rated above average for customer experience (support, product quality). Moreover, despite frequent new product releases requiring customers to upgrade, it got one of the lowest scores for migration complexity (lower means easier); over 90% of its surveyed customers were on the latest release of the software. Tableau Online – Tableau’s new cloud offerings, build on its customer-facing offerings and have the potential to expose substantially more users to Tableau products — and thereby increase Tableau’s momentum — than its traditional direct channels could.
Cautions
- Although average user count continues to grow and was above the market average in this year’s customer survey, its products are often used to complement an existing BI platform standard (only 42% of its customers considered it as their BI standard). Governance, consistency and skill silos are among the challenges faced by organizations that deploy multiple tools. Given the success of Tableau and other interactive-visualization vendors, traditional BI platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, SAP and SAS) with substantial installed-base market shares but lacking in growth momentum are aggressively investing in their own data discovery capabilities to reverse the trend. Moreover, new innovations on the automation of advanced analytics are emerging from vendors like IBM (Watson Analytics), which could threaten the dominance of the Tableau-based data discovery paradigm. These vendors are integrating and bundling data discovery capabilities with their platforms for free, or at low cost, to meet their customers’ requirements for ease of use by business users proactively and, more importantly, to defend their installed bases from Tableau and other data discovery vendors. Although these efforts have had limited success to date, the stakes are high for the incumbent vendors that are losing new license purchases to data discovery vendors such as Tableau. At some point, these BI platform vendors are likely either to become innovative enough or simply “good enough” to satisfy their existing customers, or to make acquisitions to fill the gap. This could threaten the “land and expand” growth strategy that Tableau has so far relied on for adoption as a complementary vendor.
- Rated below-average sales experience, which includes the entire sales life cycle from presales activities to contracting, pricing and the ongoing sales relationship. Gartner’s inquiries reveal that customers often view Tableau as inflexible in contract negotiations and complain that its 25% annual maintenance fee is higher than those of most other vendors. Although rated below the survey average for license costs per user (particularly as customers increase their user numbers), the cost of the software was identified as limiting broader deployment.
- Although customers report that they employ Tableau for a broad range of uses, the company lacks traditional BI platform capabilities, such as production reporting. Customers needing capabilities spanning systems-of-record reporting and interactive dashboards and visualization from a single tool are unlikely to choose Tableau as their enterprise standard. Similarly, Tableau’s user rated below survey average for enterprise features such as metadata management and BI infrastructure. Tableau’s ability to satisfy the combination of business user requirements and IT requirements for enterprise governance and manageability is still a work in process, although it offer its Data Server product to facilitate data reuse and governance. The race to secure this market “white space” remains open and highly competitive.
- Tableau continues to expand its international presence, but the majority of its customers are likely to be large (often international) companies located in North America. Tableau has opened sales offices in Europe and Asia (for example, Singapore) and introduced support in Asia; it also plans further global sales expansion with live, time-zone-appropriate support in local languages.
2. Qlik
Qlik’s QlikView product has become a market leader with its capabilities in data discovery, a segment of the BI platform market that it pioneered. QlikView is a self-contained BI platform, based on an in-memory associative search engine and a growing set of information access and query connectors, with a set of tightly integrated BI capabilities.
Strengths
- Qlik has embarked on one of the boldest strategies of any vendor to address enterprises’ unmet need for a BI platform standard that can fulfill both business users’ requirements for ease of use and IT’s requirements for enterprise features relating to reusability, data governance and control, scalability, and so on. QlikView.Next, a completely rearchitected product, shall be released in the second half of 2014. It features Natural Analytics a redesigned interactive visualization user experience to make it easier for users to discover and share new insights. Natural Analytics builds on the company’s associative search capability and incorporates enhanced comparisons, collaboration, workflow, sharing and data dialogs, enhancing insights from unique visualization techniques that Qlik acquired from NComVA in June 2013. QlikView.Next will also provide completely rearchitected enterprise server and administration capabilities, including reusable semantic intelligence and modeling that draws on its acquisition of Expressor Software, open APIs for extensibility, expanded data connectivity, and enhanced scalability and security features. By providing both business-user-oriented and IT-friendly capabilities, QlikView.Next has the potential to make Qlik a differentiated and viable enterprise-standard alternative to the incumbent BI players.
- QlikView is chosen for the intuitive interactive experience; this is most often deployed in dashboards, where it enables business users to freely explore and find connections, patterns and outliers in data without having to model those relationships in advance. In particular, QlikView’s associative search enables users easily to see query relationships without complex SQL; which query results are related, to compare them, and more importantly to identify which data elements are not related. Users can also filter data using search capabilities. Rated an above-average percentage select QlikView for of its ease of use for developers, also in the top two of all the vendors surveyed for its ease of use for end users. QlikView’s ease of use is coupled with an above-average score for the complexity of the types of analysis that users can conduct with the platform, and an above-average score for the breadth of functionality used. As a result, Qlik received one of the highest scores for market understanding of any vendor in the Magic Quadrant survey. In common with those of other stand-alone data discovery vendors, Qlik’s customers also report achieving above-average business benefits. This powerful combination of advantages has been a key driver of data discovery success for vendors in general, and for Qlik in particular.
- Positive view of QlikView’s composite functional capabilities, rated above the survey average on weighted for use, also above-average individual scores for dashboards, interactive visualization, search-based data discovery (rated No. 1), geospatial intelligence, business user data mashup, collaboration (a score near the top), big data support (also near the top) and mobile BI. A high degree of satisfaction with its mobile functionality, Qlik has among the highest percentage of users deploying, piloting or planning to deploy mobile capabilities in the next 12 months.
- Qlik’s above-average scores for ease of use for developers, particularly when compared with traditional IT-centric enterprise vendors, has resulted in better-than-average implementation costs, IT developer costs and overall three-year BI platform ownership costs per user. The perception that QlikView offers a relatively low cost of ownership comparing with other vendors’ products. High percentage of customers choose QlikView because of its implementation cost and associated effort, as well as its TCO.
- Qlik has been successfully expanding its reach and awareness beyond its traditional stronghold of Europe (it was founded in Sweden) to North America, as well as to the growing regions of Asia/Pacific and Latin America. The partner channel is more important to Qlik than to any other BI platform vendor except Microsoft, particularly in comparison to its stand-alone data discovery competitors. The partner channel will be particularly important to Qlik’s growth after the introduction of QlikView.Next, given the expectation that partners will use the platform’s planned improved openness to build new QlikView.Next-based solutions.
Cautions
- The enterprise-readiness of the current release of QlikView remains a work in process. Despite QlikView being deployed in multiple departments and around the world, only half the QlikView customers we surveyed identified QlikView as their enterprise standard. This is far below the figures of most other incumbent BI vendors, whose customers report standardization rates of over 70%. QlikView received below-average customer survey scores for enterprise features such as metadata management, BI infrastructure and embeddable analytics. Additionally, customers and implementers continued to express concerns about QlikView’s facilities for managing security and administering large numbers of named users. Although user deployment sizes and average data sizes continue to increase, they are around the survey average.
- Customers most often select QlikView for its ease of use for end users, particularly in terms of its interactive dashboards and when compared with the offerings of the incumbent IT-centric vendors. However, in terms of visual-based interactive exploration and analysis capabilities, user experience, and the time it takes for business users to gain proficiency in authoring, the current QlikView 11.x release is considered more limited than offerings from other stand-alone data discovery vendors. With QlikView.Next, Qlik is placing major emphasis on filling this gap.
- Qlik plans for QlikView.Next to deliver the combination of business user and IT capabilities that is currently lacking in the market. However, QlikView.Next will be delivered more than a year later than expected, which creates opportunities for its competitors to narrow any gaps. Moreover, no major rearchitecting is without risks to both customers and vendor, especially when the latter is also facing a more intense competitive landscape, as is the case with Qlik. It is not unusual for initial “point versions” of major releases to take time to reach complete stability. In addition, adopting this major new release will require some degree of migration, which could delay some deployments that might otherwise have occurred in 1H14. During the extended period before QlikView.Next’s arrival, its competitors are not standing still. Incumbent vendors, stand-alone data discovery players and new market entrants continue aggressively to build and enhance their data discovery features, to innovate and make progress (some quickly) toward narrowing Qlik’s “land and expand” potential and, more importantly, toward addressing the big “white space” opportunity (to delight business users while still offering IT control) that Qlik plans to address with QlikView.Next.
- Qlik’s customer experience results remain mixed. QlikView earned positive scores for product quality, which led to an overall above-average customer experience score. However, support scores for QlikView were again just below the survey average. Similarly, sales experience continued to be rated below the survey average. We believe these results are partly influenced by Qlik’s rapid growth, since both support and sales proficiency are strongly correlated with employees’ length of service; high growth means a larger percentage of relatively new sales and support people. Moreover, Qlik’s sales and support organizations are in transition from selling to and supporting departments to selling to and supporting strategic enterprise deployments. A successful transformation on both fronts is critical if Qlik is to fulfill its enterprise aspirations for QlikView.Next.
3. Microsoft
Microsoft offers a competitive and expanding set of BI and analytics capabilities, packaging and pricing that appeal to Microsoft developers, independent distributors and now to business users. It does so through a combination of enhanced BI and data discovery capabilities in Office (Excel) 2013, data management capabilities in SQL Server, and collaboration, content, and user and usage management capabilities in SharePoint.
Strengths
- Of the megavendors, Microsoft has made the most progress toward delivering a combination of business user capabilities with an enterprise-capable platform. Microsoft delivered business-user-oriented data discovery and other BI capabilities in Excel 2013. It is enhancing these aggressively through its Power BI cloud offering by adding geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL with usage and trust ratings across internal and external data sources, as well as the ability to promote a personal PowerPivot workbook to an enterprise data source. These enhancements contribute to Microsoft’s overall vision and make it a strong contender for addressing the requirements to bridge the divide between business and enterprise users.
- Microsoft has made early investments in its cloud-based BI offering, Power BI. Microsoft’s strategy is to use the cloud to increase adoption of its new and most competitive BI capabilities in Excel (starting with Excel 2013), and to accelerate enhancements to Excel to every six months. This strategy is designed to lower the cost of ownership of BI and to reduce deployment challenges stemming from customers needing to implement and manage Office, SQL Server and SharePoint for the full range of Microsoft’s BI capabilities. This combination can be particularly attractive for organizations that choose to standardize on Microsoft for information management. However, the success of this strategy will depend in large part on continued acceleration in users’ acceptance and adoption of cloud-based BI.
- Microsoft’s strategy for bundling BI into its most widely used products, together with its enterprise pricing, often gives it a compelling value proposition in terms of license cost for organizations that want to deploy BI to a wider range of users, or that want to lower their overall BI license costs by using lower-cost tools for basic functions. In the customer survey conducted for this Magic Quadrant, more Microsoft customers cited TCO and license cost as their main reasons for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor than did those of most of the other vendors; this has been the case for each of the past seven years in which Gartner has conducted this survey.
- Microsoft composite product score was above average across the 17 capabilities, when weighted for use. Microsoft customers appreciate its strong BI infrastructure and development tools. They also rated its reporting, ad hoc query, Microsoft Office integration, business user data mashup, embedded BI, collaboration, search BI and OLAP capabilities higher than the survey average. Importantly, unlike those of its megavendor competitors, Microsoft’s customers rated customer experience (support and product quality) above the survey average. Moreover, Microsoft’s success is also driven partly by its IT-oriented BI authoring tools within SQL Server, which are based on Visual Studio, a broadly adopted development environment. Microsoft customers rated its BI development tools as No. 1 in the survey, and its BI platform infrastructure as among the best, with a higher percentage of customers using both extensively. Furthermore, “wide availability of skills” is among the top reasons why customers select Microsoft more often than any of its competitors. While Microsoft’s BI platform attracts small to midsize enterprises, it is also widely deployed in large enterprises as a standard. One of the highest percentage of customers in the survey reported standardizing on Microsoft’s BI platform.
Cautions
- Although Microsoft’s functional ratings have improved and it can offer a wide range of functions, it also has one of the highest percentages of users who say that absent or weak functionality is among the main reasons limiting broader deployment of its software. Mobile BI, interactive visualization and metadata management remain product weaknesses reported by customers. In particular, Microsoft lags behind most other BI vendors in delivering mobile BI capabilities, with some of the lowest results for mobile functionality and percentage use. Microsoft plans to offer HTML5 support that will enable browser-based viewing and exploration of reports from any device with an HTML5-capable browser. It also plans to use its cloud offering, Power BI, to deliver a Windows mobile app that offers a touchscreen-optimized mobile BI experience initially for Windows devices (support for an iOS version is planned for after the launch of Power BI). Latent demand for Microsoft’s mobile BI is evident from the survey, with Microsoft’s respondents including one of the highest percentages (51%) that plan to implement mobile BI in the coming year. Despite product enhancements, Microsoft BI is primarily used for static and parameterized reporting by report consumers. Although Microsoft has a broader range of users conducting more complex types of analysis this year than last, its support for more complex types of analysis and adoption by advanced users remains below the survey average.
- Multiproduct complexity remains a challenge, now primarily for on-premises and hybrid deployments. Because Microsoft’s BI platform capabilities span three different tools (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint) that also perform non-BI functions, the task of integrating components and building applications is left mainly to the customer. This “do it yourself” approach places more of the onus for BI solution development and integration of platform components on customers, compared with the all-in-one, purpose-built BI platforms offered by most other BI vendors. Microsoft is depending on its BI cloud offerings to reduce deployment complexity, particularly for smaller companies lacking the necessary skills.
- Although Microsoft’s partner-driven sales model drives global growth for the company, Gartner’s inquiries suggest that this approach often makes it difficult for customers to find their Microsoft sales representative. This causes frustration that may put downward pressure on Microsoft’s sales experience scores, which, despite a favorable view of Microsoft’s pricing, are below the survey average.
4. SAS
SAS’s analytics portfolio spans platforms for BI, performance management, data warehousing, in-memory databases, data integration, data quality, decision management, and content and social analytics, with a core strength being advanced analytics. SAS also offers industry- and domain-specific analytic applications built on its product portfolio.
Strengths
- SAS’s analytics portfolio spans platforms for BI, performance management, data warehousing, in-memory databases, data integration, data quality, and content and social analytics. However, unlike most other BI platform vendors, SAS’s core strength is in its advanced analytical techniques, such as data mining, predictive modeling, simulation and optimization, for which it is acknowledged as a Leader in “Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.”
- Historically, SAS tools have been used primarily by power users, data scientists and IT-centric BI developers. That this remains the case is shown by SAS customers placing it above any other vendor in the Magic Quadrant survey in terms of support for complex types of analysis, but giving it one of the lowest scores for ease of use. During the past five years, SAS has been investing heavily in revamping its user experience to change this situation and encourage more mainstream user adoption. In 2012, SAS released Visual Analytics, a business-user-oriented data discovery and BI platform targeted at less technical and analytically sophisticated users. The product uses SAS’s Lasr Analytic Server, an in-memory server for large-scale data analysis, and, uniquely, merges easy-to-use production reporting with an intuitive interactive and visual data exploration experience differentiated by advanced analytic visualizations that expose insights such as correlations, clusters and forecasts to users without statistical expertise. Unlike the other incumbent leaders in this market, SAS has made a bold strategic decision to make Visual Analytics its “go forward” BI platform and the front-end reporting and analysis tool for all its analytic applications. This strategy not only unifies SAS’s historically unintegrated front-end tools; if successful, it will also place SAS in a strong position to defend its installed base against stand-alone data discovery vendors and, more importantly, to address both business user and systems-of-record analytics requirements from a single business-user-friendly platform. This aggressive and unmatched strategy is part of the reason for SAS’s favorable Completeness of Vision position.
- SAS also differentiates itself from most other BI platform vendors by productizing and selling industry- and domain-specific advanced analytic applications that are focused on specific business problems and built using many of its technology platform products. This enables it to sell “value,” rather than components.
- Data access and integration and the ability to support large volumes of data are the main reasons customers choose SAS, according to the survey. In fact, while SAS deployments support a below-average number of users, its data volumes are among the highest in the survey. Moreover, its support for content and social analytics differentiates it from most other BI vendors. SAS’s recent efforts regarding its Lasr Analytic Server, in-memory database, Hadoop and grid computing analytics are likely to reinforce this differentiation. Availability of skills is also identified as a strength, owing to the existence of a wide and loyal base of users, many of whom have built careers around SAS products. A broad sales and service ecosystem, with a low turnover of direct sales staff, is probably also responsible for above-average survey results for sales relationship, despite concerns, identified both in the survey and during Gartner’s other inquiries with customers, about the cost of SAS software.
Cautions
- SAS customers consider its software among the most difficult to use and most difficult to implement, with ease of use for business users being identified as a limitation on broader deployment by a higher percentage of customers than for any other vendor. SAS customers also report one of the highest average number of days required to create a report. Additionally, their reported three-year BI platform ownership costs were among the highest of any vendor in the survey. Furthermore, customers scored SAS’s product quality and support below the survey average. Replacing SAS’s multiple power-user-oriented tools with Visual Analytics should help to improve customers’ perception of SAS’s ease of use, but improving product quality and support must become SAS’s imperative.
- Although SAS has exploited its core competency in predictive analytics to encapsulate and automate advanced analysis for business-user-oriented guided data discovery in Visual Analytics, it will face competition from data discovery and BI and analytics platform vendors with leading-edge data discovery capabilities, such as Tableau and Tibco. It will also face competition from others, such as IBM (with Watson Analytics), Alteryx, and emerging startup vendors that are rethinking the data discovery exploration paradigm to expand their user bases as they try to create a similar smart (advanced-analytics-driven), data discovery experience.
- Despite SAS’s success as a Leader in the predictive analytics space, the company still faces a challenge to make it onto BI platform shortlists, unless customers already use its other advanced analytic capabilities and require integration and leverage of skills. Reference customers identified cost and poor ease of use (No. 1 in the survey) as the most common factors limiting further adoption, and they also awarded low scores for achievement of business benefits. It is significant that fewer than 40% of SAS’s reference customers — compared with 50% last year — indicated that SAS was their company’s BI platform standard. SAS plans for its aggressive strategy for Visual Analytics to elicit positive results in the future.
- SAS’s reference customers rated functionality used in traditional BI areas (reporting, dashboards, OLAP, interactive visualization and so on) lower than for most of the other BI Leaders. Exceptions were the scores for ad hoc query, Microsoft Office integration, BI infrastructure, development tools, metadata, embedded advanced and embeddable analytics, and support for big data, as clients are aggressively using SAS BI for these.
5. SAP
SAP’s BusinessObjects BI Suite delivers a broad range of BI and analytic capabilities through a semantic layer best suited for large IT-managed deployments that require robust governance and administrative capabilities. Companies often choose SAP as their enterprise BI standard, particularly if they also standardize on SAP for ERP applications.
Strengths
- SAP’s BI customers reported an average deployment size three times the survey average, with over 80% identifying SAP as their enterprise BI standard. Over 60% of its surveyed customers use SAP as their primary ERP system, which indicates a strong stack-centric value proposition. This is underlined by 20% of its reference customers — among the highest percentage in the survey — indicating that integration with enterprise applications was their main reason for selecting SAP as a BI vendor.
- SAP has been investing heavily in SAP Lumira to establish a presence in the rapidly growing data discovery market where demand is high for BI tools that empower business users to self-serve without being restricted to a centrally governed semantic layer and IT-managed content. Lumira has been the focus of aggressive product development (including some “smart data discovery” features) and marketing efforts, which are expected to continue, with functional enhancements planned for both the desktop and cloud versions, along with the release of Lumira Server, which will run natively on the SAP Hana platform.
- SAP is widely used to embed BI content, but is not widely used by customers to embed advanced (predictive and prescriptive) analytic content. However, this capability is a key strategic aim for SAP, with both Hana and KXEN, which it acquired in 2013, at its core. Its intention is to expand the reach of its BI and analytics to make advanced analytic content accessible at the point of consumption for end users by embedding it into purpose-built packaged applications powered by Hana, or bundling it with SAP’s Business Suite applications. The release in late 2013 of SAP InfiniteInsight (based on the acquired KXEN product), which is bundled with SAP Predictive Analysis, confirms SAP’s strategic direction and commitment to embedded and accessible advanced analytics and smart data discovery by combining the capabilities of Hana, KXEN and Lumira in a single platform that delivers sophisticated (in some cases, automated) predictive and prescriptive analytic capabilities to a broad range of business users.
- In 2013, SAP continued to expand its BI Customer Success initiative, which is aimed at improving its overall customer experience in response to years of poor survey results in this area. In addition to a focus on product quality and reliability, the most notable aspects of the initiative are a new BI Customer Success website and an expanded online curriculum of BI- specific courses available through its openSAP training portal, which have been well received and used by customers and SAP’s large network of partners. These efforts appear to be benefiting SAP’s customer experience survey ratings, which have improved overall from the previous survey. Although still below this year’s overall Magic Quadrant vendor average for customer experience, customers running SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 noted improvements, which indicates a positive trend in terms of customer experience for SAP’s recent releases.
Cautions
- Customers rated SAP third-lowest overall for market understanding. This includes ease of use and support for complex types of analysis, where it came second lowest. Additionally, 25% of SAP’s reference customers indicated limitations on wider deployment in terms of ease of use for business users, the second-highest percentage of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant. SAP customers use SAP BusinessObjects BI primarily for reporting; the number that use it for interactive discovery or visualization was well below the average for vendors in this Magic Quadrant. While SAP has reported significant activity in terms of Lumira software downloads, Gartner has yet to see evidence that Lumira is gaining traction and being adopted in production as a data discovery tool. SAP will have to continue to invest in and evolve its data discovery capabilities in order to convince customers that Lumira is a viable option, compared with the strong leaders in this competitive sector.
- Before the release of version 4.1, SAP customers upgrading from BusinessObjects 3.x to 4.0 in 2013 encountered issues during the migration, and this was clearly indicated in the survey results when reference customers were asked about migration difficulty. Overall, SAP was rated more difficult than the survey average for migration difficulty; customers using BusinessObjects 3.1 rated it the most difficult of all the products in the survey, and many customers on version 4.0 also rated their migration experience more difficult than the survey average. It should be noted, however, that references who have migrated to SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 rated the migration experience better than the survey average, indicating improvement in this area for SAP’s most recent releases. This should benefit customers who have yet to upgrade to the latest version of SAP BusinessObjects.
- SAP’s reference customers rated it third-lowest overall for sales experience, and 42% identified cost as a factor limiting wider deployment. This theme has become more prevalent in Gartner’s dealings with clients (including contract reviews), with customers raising concerns about being pushed by SAP’s sales team to increase capacity, add functionality in new bundles, or move to the Hana platform, which would result in increased license cost structures. This has frustrated customers who expect upgrades to be included in the software maintenance cost. SAP needs to address this concern with more transparent pricing and improved communication of upgrade requirements and upselling and cross-selling proposals, so that customers can make more informed buying decisions.
- Although SAP offers a broad range of BI and analytic capabilities, seamless integration of these across the product stack remains a work in progress. There have been improvements in this respect, particularly with the integration of individual products within the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform (Web Intelligence, Explorer, Dashboards and Crystal Reports), but SAP has more work to do to integrate newer products, such as Lumira, Predictive Analysis and KXEN, fully into its BI and analytic portfolio. SAP is positioning Hana as the strategic database and in-memory platform that will enable much of the advanced analytics functionality delivered by Lumira, Predictive Analysis and KXEN, but this has generated some concern among SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and SAP BusinessObjects customers, who perceive a lack of clarity about the level of investment and product development effort that SAP will commit to traditional BI platforms and products in the future.
6. IBM
IBM offers a complete range of enterprise-grade BI, performance management and advanced analytics platform capabilities, complemented by a deep services organization that is ready to implement them in solutions for any domain, industry or geography.
Strengths
- IBM is pushing new boundaries in the analytics space. A strategic objective to broaden and grow its portfolio in BI, analytics and performance management, coupled with support from IBM Global Services and a global presence, makes IBM the leading vendor for Completeness of Vision, although other vendors are closing in. High marks for sales strategy, product strategy, and industry and geographic strategies, bolster IBM’s position on the Magic Quadrant.
- With an average data volume accessed in data repositories of over 10TB, an average deployment size of 2,428 users (top quartile; the average for vendors in this report is 1,364), and the biggest queries accessed averaging 1,858GB (second only to MicroStrategy), the IBM Cognos BI platform handles some of the largest deployments evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Further evidence of IBM’s enterprise-ready credentials is that the platform earned an enterprise deployment score (for size of deployments and global pervasiveness across an organization) in the top three in our survey. Moreover, two of IBM’s most highly rated product capabilities are metadata management and BI infrastructure and administration. Both are requirements for supporting large enterprise systems-of-record deployments, reinforcing IBM Cognos’s strengths as a platform capable of supporting large deployments. IBM customers also rated its traditional BI capabilities for ad hoc reporting, dashboards and OLAP capabilities above the average.
- After a first attempt to enter the data discovery market with IBM Cognos Insight, IBM is trying a radically new approach, which we refer to in this report as “smart data discovery.” Watson Analytics — to be released in 2014 — allows business users to analyze data without any technical or statistical knowledge. When queried using natural language (for example, “Why are sales down in the East region?”), the cloud-based tool accesses datasets, correlates information and infers conclusions that are then presented in a visually engaging and streamlined interface accessible to business users of every skill level. The insights can be further refined through other questions. It uses natural-language query and other innovations developed from IBM’s Watson project, as well as advances developed for IBM’s SPSS Analytic Catalyst product that hide the complexities of advanced analytics. IBM is trying to use lessons learned from the Watson project to create a next-generation data discovery tool that may transform the paradigm of how information is used in organizations; indeed, if disruption occurs soon in this sector, it will probably result from innovations introduced with Watson Analytics. Customers and vendors alike should prepare for its potential impact. To further strengthen its position in the growing area of “smart systems,” including “smart data discovery,” IBM recently announced the creation of the Watson Business Group, entailing the allocation of 2,000 professionals, the investment of $1 billion over the next few years, and the creation of an investment fund to foster the creation of a third-party application ecosystem.
- In 2013, IBM significantly simplified the Cognos licensing model, reducing 28 roles to only two: BI Architect for system administration and BI User with full access via Web, desktop or mobile device to all the information exploration and reporting capabilities. Purchasing, license administration and even information consumption should become simpler. To date, Gartner has seen limited adoption of this new model, but IBM will increase its efforts to advance it in 2014. Customers should ask for pricing using the new two-role metric, to see whether it will result in a more favorable average license cost per user.
Cautions
- Unusually, IBM customers did not report clear reasons for selecting its platform, except for choosing IBM Cognos because it is their corporate standard. The lack of recognizable advantages over its competitors might compromise IBM’s future in the BI and analytics space. Watson Analytics could be a response to this issue, as it represents a significant opportunity for IBM to differentiate itself, if it can integrate the capabilities with IBM Cognos to combine its strong enterprise features with innovative, business-user-oriented data discovery.
- Customers identify several limitations that prevent broader deployment of IBM solutions. Cost of software is the main reason, cited by 40% of IBM customers — double the survey’s 20% average. IBM also scored near the bottom for sales experience. Gartner’s inquiries have revealed frustration with IBM’s sales and contracting, and high numbers of audits. Customers also identify poor performance, lack of ease of use for business users and developers, and poor support quality as inhibitors to wider adoption. An above-average percentage, 8.5% of IBM Cognos 10 customers, reported performance as a product limitation, compared with the market average of 4.6%. Results have nevertheless improved significantly from those for previous product versions, and could now be in part due to the platform’s support for large datasets and deployments.
- Many of IBM’s product capability scores are below the survey average for this Magic Quadrant — those for geospatial and location intelligence, interactive visualization, embedded advanced analytics (unsurprising since IBM SPSS is a separate product for which integration with the IBM Cognos platform is a work in process) and embeddable analytics. It also takes 6.2 days on average to create a report using the platform (an average of simple, moderate and complex reports), compared with the survey average of 4.3 days — a result near the higher end in this Magic Quadrant. Support for more complex types of analysis beyond reporting scored below the market average, and IBM’s score for ease of use for business users is near the bottom. We expect these perceptions to improve once Watson Analytics is generally available and widely deployed in IBM’s installed base.
- Overall, IBM’s customers placed IBM in the bottom quartile for achievement of business benefits from its BI deployments — similar to most other IT-centric vendors. IBM is trying to skip a generation of data discovery tools and move into “smart discovery,” but this approach may encounter unexpected technical challenges and could take some time for customers to realize its full potential. In the meantime, IBM must continue to invest in the usability and basic capabilities of its current product line, in order to overcome or at least mitigate some of the weaknesses identified in this Magic Quadrant.
7. Tibco Software
Tibco Software is one of the early leaders in the field of data discovery, with a flexible, easy-to-use platform for user-driven information exploration and analysis. It is also used for publishing interactive and visual dashboards, building predictive models and authoring analytic applications.
Strengths
- Together with Qlik and Tableau, Tibco Software sets the data discovery benchmark that traditional BI vendors are trying to emulate. Its strategy to evolve differs from those of its point solution competitors — Tibco is aggressively extending its product functionality through both acquisitions and in-house development, and strengthening the touchpoints with other core capabilities in the company’s portfolio, including real-time business operations.
- Pursuing an ambitious strategy that dates back to 2012, Tibco has integrated product capabilities from three acquired companies with Spotfire:
- process monitoring and event stream analysis from StreamBase Systems
- geospatial analytics from Maporama Solutions
- real-time KPIs and enhanced user experiences on mobile devices from Extended Results
- Cloud capabilities were also added, as a result of internal development. Thus, Tibco is positioning Spotfire as a data discovery platform capable of real-time and bidirectional integration with business processes. Tibco is trying to anticipate where the market is heading, and is aggressively laying foundations for a BI and analytics platform capable of collecting and monitoring events, analyzing trends and exceptions, predicting, optimizing and prescribing actions, and sharing insights and comments, all with a simple-to-use information exploration interface. Time will tell whether organizations are ready to invest in and benefit from this broad vision.
- Two strong reasons for selecting Tibco: Functionality and ease of use for end users.
- Rated above average for the product’s quality (stability, reliability and free from bugs).
- The platform’s capabilities are ranked high for interactive visualization and embedded advanced analytics.
- Scored above the average for Search-based data discovery, embeddable analytics, collaboration, support for big data and enterprise-deployment-readiness.
- Ranks third for the ability to enable users to perform complex analyses, while maintaining ease of use. This is a key combination that has driven the success of data discovery tools, including Tibco Spotfire, and is a major strength supporting future growth.
- Tibco Spotfire’s average deployment size, at 1,476 users, has grown and is above the survey average. Although its average size of data repositories accessed is below the survey average, the average size of its biggest query, at around 1TB, is more than double the survey average. These findings, together with the fact that only 1.5% of its surveyed customers reported poor performance as a problem (well below the survey average), indicate that Tibco has an opportunity to increase its footprint in current deployments and to compete for larger, more-data-intensive ones.
Cautions
- The positive results Tibco achieved for the time required to create a simple report (the third-shortest in the survey) are typical for a data discovery tool, but the fact that Spotfire struggles to create a large complex report from various data sources poses a challenge (it takes an average of 8.7 days to do this, according to the survey, which is longer than the survey average). As it adds more capabilities to the platform — especially those from acquisitions — Tibco must invest in maintaining or improving its usability, particularly for developers.
- Unexpected average rate on product capabilities, dashboards, whereas we would expect them to be a strength, given that Spotfire is one of the leading data discovery tools. Other platform capabilities, such as BI infrastructure and administration, development tools and metadata management, were rated below the survey average; these are enterprise features that remain a work in process as Tibco works to enhance its enterprise-readiness.
- Tibco’s customers identified two main product limitations to broader deployment:
- support quality, which is a concern for 6% of customers (slightly above the vendor average in this Magic Quadrant)
- cost of software, which is seen as a problem by 31%. Tibco has introduced a new pricing model to address this concern.
- Although Tibco has relatively good geographic presence, reports received by Gartner indicate that in some areas its local support and sales staff do not cover Spotfire adequately, and that the product does not receive the same level of sales focus in all geographies. This may be one reason why, in many areas outside North America and the major markets of Europe, customers’ shortlists for data discovery tools seldom include Tibco. The company must keep working hard to raise its awareness in the market and should expand Spotfire’s local support and sales teams.
8. Oracle
Oracle has a wide range of BI and analytics-related technologies and products that customers use as a BI platform, including
- Oracle Business Intelligence (BI)
- Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
- Endeca Information Discovery
Strengths
- Oracle has long been a leader in information management. Oracle BI Server is the primary Oracle presentation and query engine. It provides optimized and federated query generation to heterogeneous data sources. It is aggregate-aware, with aggregate navigation determined by manual or automatic metadata configuration. It is often deployed to support large-scale, systems-of-record reporting and dashboard requirements. Endeca Information Discovery complements Oracle BI as a search-based data discovery platform, providing faceted browsing, search, self-service data mashups and interactive discovery-style analytics; but it has its own query engine and search-based presentation services, which can source from Oracle BI Server’s semantic model. Oracle BI on Exalytics uses the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory RDBMS for performance optimization (TimesTen uses columnar storage compression).
- Customers choose Oracle for its integration within solutions based on Oracle applications and technology. In particular, Oracle offers over 80 prebuilt analytic applications for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and other enterprise applications, including industry-specific packaged analytic applications. These analytic applications include prebuilt ETL, data warehouse models, KPIs, reports and dashboards. Oracle BI analytics optimizations with Oracle Essbase and the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management platform enable customers to implement an end-to-end analytic process for financial budgeting, planning, consolidation and close processes. Oracle also has integration between Oracle BI, Oracle Complex Event Processing and Oracle Real-Time Decisions to support real-time event detection and analysis. However, the complexity of analysis conducted by Oracle customers who responded to our survey is less than that indicated by customers of most of the other vendors in the survey.
- Oracle BI supports large-scale, traditional, IT-led BI deployments, with most Oracle BI deployments supporting traditional BI reporting and dashboarding. Oracle customers reported among the largest deployments in terms of numbers of users and data sizes, with 69% of the Oracle customers stating that Oracle BI is their enterprise BI standard.
- Oracle has a large network of partners with products and implementation services, many of which offer implementation services for Oracle’s information management and BI platform and analytic products. Oracle’s large installed base of database products, middleware and applications presents an opportunity for these partners to bundle and sell BI solutions. However, a large number of service offerings does not guarantee uniformity, quality of service or competency across the multiple Oracle-BI-platform-related products.
Cautions
- Oracle’s BI and analytics products are becoming the system of record (in pace layer terms) for large-scale, multi-business-unit and multi-geography implementations. Most of the use as indicated by the survey: almost 80%— for parameterized and static reports and dashboards. Only 8% use Oracle for “interactive data discovery and exploration” (for Tableau and Qlik, over 90% of users employ interactive data discovery and visualization capabilities). These products, with larger interactive data discovery and exploration capabilities, are being sold to Oracle’s installed base, given that Oracle has been late to fill this need (although it is working on initiatives to address this gap). This mix of vendors and technologies (as with the other IT-centric vendors that have had data discovery gaps filled by specialist vendors) may require more rigorous or complicated governance and support methodologies.
- Oracle has a broad portfolio addressing a range of analytic requirements, configuring and supporting these products, often serving a large number of diverse users, requires IT program management and fairly sophisticated BI-related competencies. Resulting in among the lowest score for customer experience, including support and product quality, on the recent Oracle BI releases. This impacted Oracle’s scores and position for Ability to Execute. Beyond customer experience, weak score for ease of use, sales experience and achievement of business benefits; for the fourth year in a row they were among the lowest in survey (though the same has been true of most of the other megavendors).
- rated Higher-than-average mobile use associated with Oracle BI platform products and applications, but Oracle was late to the market with the variety of mobile platforms it supports. There has been a large uptake of Oracle BI Mobile in the past two years (either as an option for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition or included with the Oracle BI Foundation Suite). Although Oracle now has a clearer strategy and product plan for mobile offerings, it might mean that customers, especially those with non-Oracle mobile infrastructures for their BI applications, should plan for switching or upgrade costs in the near future as Oracle brings to market its strategic mobile technology platform and capabilities based on the BI Mobile App Designer (introduced in August 2013).
- Oracle’s plan for BI cloud services is new and evolving (no service is yet in general availability). New Oracle BI platform-related cloud service products are planned to reach the market in 2014, but these will provide different development and usage experiences from its current BI platforms. The mix of capabilities will mean new customer experience, development and support requirements, which may introduce an additional IT support and training challenge.