Description
In Forresters 15-criteria evaluation of Agile business intelligence (BI) vendors.
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence
Platforms, Q3 2015
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
September 25, 2015
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
FORRESTER.COM
Key Takeaways
BI Choices Abound With Nine Leading Vendors
And Four Strong Competitors
Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which
Microsoft, SAP, Qlik, MicroStrategy, TIBCO
Software, SAS, GoodData, Oracle, and Tableau
Software lead the pack. Panorama, Information
Builders, IBM, and Birst offer competitive options.
The Agile BI Market Is Growing As AD&D Pros
Focus On Supporting Business Agility
The Agile BI market is growing because more
AD&D professionals see Agile BI platforms as a
way to address their top challenges. This market
growth is in large part due to the fact that AD&D
pros increasingly trust Agile BI providers to act as
strategic partners, advising them on top business,
data, and information agility decisions.
Business User BI Self-Service Is The Key
Differentiator In The Agile BI Market
As enterprise BI driven by technology
management becomes commoditized, features
that empower business users to be self-suffcient
will differentiate software providers. Vendors that
can deliver business user self-service features
without sacrifcing essential enterprise capabilities
will position themselves to deliver the best BI
platforms to their customers.
Why Read This Report
In Forrester’s 15-criteria evaluation of Agile
business intelligence (BI) vendors, we identifed
the 13 most signifcant software providers in the
category —Birst, GoodData, IBM, Information
Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle,
Panorama, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, and
TIBCO Software —and researched, analyzed,
and scored them. This report details our fndings
about how well each vendor fulflls our criteria
and where they stand in relation to each other
to help application development and delivery
(AD&D) professionals select the right platform for
their Agile BI requirements.
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6
8
10
16
© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions refect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester
®
,
Technographics
®
, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester
Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or
distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
+1 617-613-6000 | Fax: +1 617-613-5000 | forrester.com
Table Of Contents
Agile BI Is A Key Element In The Business
Agility Equation
Agile Enterprises Need Agile BI Platforms
Everything You Wanted To Know About Agile
BI But Were Afraid To Ask
Empower Business Users To Be Self-Suffcient
Help Business User Get More Insights With
Effective Data Visualizations
Look For Technology Professionals To Provide
Additional Features
Agile BI Platforms Evaluation Overview
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering,
Strategy, And Market Presence
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To
Support Complex Agile BI Requirements
Agile BI Is A Buyer’s Market That Offers
Plenty Of Choices
Vendor Pro?les
Leaders
Strong Performers
Supplemental Material
Notes & Resources
Forrester conducted demos, briefngs, and
interviewed customer references in June 2015.
Related Research Documents
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q1 2015
Forrester’s 10-Step Methodology For Shortlisting
Business Intelligence Vendors
It’s Time For A User-Driven Enterprise BI Strategy
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
with Holger Kisker, Ph.D., Martha Bennett, Sophia Christakis, and Ian McPherson
September 25, 2015
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
September 25, 2015
© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
[email protected] or +1 866-367-7378
2
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Agile BI Is A Key Element In The Business Agility Equation
Customers are more and more empowered with mobile devices and cloud-based, all but unlimited
access to information about products, services, and prices. Customer stickiness is increasingly diffcult to
achieve as they demand instant gratifcation for their ever changing tastes and requirements. Switching
product and service providers is now just a matter of clicking a few keys on a mobile phone. Forrester
calls this the age of the customer, which elevates business and technology priorities to achieve:
› Business agility. Business agility often equals the ability to adopt, react, and succeed in the midst
of an unending fountain of customer driven requirements. Agile organizations make decisions
differently by embracing a new, more grass-roots-based management approach. Employees down
in the trenches, in individual business units, are the ones who are in close touch with customer
problems, market shifts, and process ineffciencies. These workers are often in the best position
to understand challenges and opportunities and to make decisions to improve the business. It is
only when responses to change come from these highly aware and empowered employees, that
enterprises become agile, competitive, and successful.
› Information agility. Agile enterprises must gather customer and market knowledge and rapidly
incorporate it into decisions. To support and promote business agility, enterprise knowledge
workers need to be empowered with easy access to agile, fexible, and responsive enterprise BI
tools and applications. Yet, while organizations of all sizes made signifcant headway over the last
two decades in their enterprise BI accomplishments, many organizations still struggle with making
their data and information management, BI, and analytics environments agile.
Agile Enterprises Need Agile BI Platforms
Alas, earlier generation BI platforms are often anything but agile. Indeed, all modern enterprise BI
platforms are scalable and robust, support and promote a single version of the truth, and minimize
operational risk. But these capabilities carry a hefty price tag of complexity, rigidity, and infexibility, and
as a result they are slow to react to constantly changing customer and business requirements. This
lack of BI agility promotes two unfortunate side effects of earlier generation BI deployments:
› Only a small percentage of enterprise data is leveraged for business insights. Only 40%
of structured, 31% of unstructured, and 27% of semistructured enterprise data is leveraged for
business intelligence and quantitative decision-making (see Figure 1).
1
› Majority of BI applications are still built by a shadow IT process. Forrester research fnds that
majority of organizations (63%) still build most (more than 50%) of the BI applications based on
desktop tools such as spreadsheets. More than a quarter of respondents (26%) share an even
more dreary story — 70% or more of all BI apps are built in a shadow IT environment (see Figure 2).
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
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September 25, 2015
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 1 Only A Small Percentage Of Enterprise Data Is Used For Insights
Semistructured data
Base: 1,805 global technology decision-makers who
know how much BI data their frm uses
Note: The percentages shown are estimates based on reported ranges; the values are not exact.
Source: Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2015
Use
31%
Don’t use
69%
Use
27%
Don’t use
73%
Use
40%
Don’t use
60%
Unstructured data Structured data
Please estimate what percentage of the total size/volume of
data within your company your company is currently using for BI
FIGURE 2 Majority Of BI Applications Live In Shadow IT
Base: 249 North American business decision-makers
Source: Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2014
Percent of homegrown enterprise BI apps
50% + 60% + 70% + 80% + 90% + 100%
Percent responding
26% 35% 63% 15% 6% 3%
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September 25, 2015
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Everything You Wanted To Know About Agile BI But Were Afraid To Ask
Point-and-click, drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces (GUIs) may be intuitive to an experienced
professional with a background in command-line interfaces but not so obvious to a millennial who grew
up with a thumb-typing mobile phone UI. And while menu- and prompt-driven instrumented (radio
buttons, dialog boxes, etc.) applications may seem user friendly to left-brained people (who think in
numbers and lists), right-brained offce workers (who see the world in pictures and associations) may
prefer an application driven by icons, visual associations, and artistic infographics. Forrester takes
a more practical approach and describes Agile BI in highly objective and quantifable terms, which
specifcally address many of the shortcomings and limitations (rigid and restrictive data models, too
much reliance on technology management professionals, and many others) of the earlier generation
enterprise BI platforms.
Empower Business Users To Be Self-Suf?cient
Core Agile BI requires capabilities that empower business users to be self-suffcient in their BI
environment with little or no involvement from technology professionals. These capabilities are typically
supported by BI platform features such as:
› Self-provisioning applications and data. How effciently can business users connect to new
data sources and provision applications, data, and resources? This includes such capabilities as
application sandboxes, data upload, data virtualization and drill anywhere, elasticity, semantic layer,
and mobile delivery.
› Data integration, mashups, and wrangling. How effciently and effectively can business users
perform various data transformation tasks? This includes capabilities such as automodeling,
calculated measures, data mashups, data wrangling, lightweight data quality functions, and write
back (changing values in a cube, data mart, datawarehouse, or transactional databases).
› BI automation. Does the BI platform support various self-service BI automation processes that
allow business users to do more with less? Beyond commoditized and nondifferentiated features
like report batches, report scheduling, etc., these features should include such capabilities as auto
information discovery, actionable BI, contextual BI, suggestive BI, and managing a full BI life cycle
with a single integrated development environment (IDE).
› Effective user interfaces. How easily can business users create their own reports and dashboards
and run data exploration and other relevant tasks? Going beyond highly commoditized and
nondifferentiated GUI features like point-and-click and drag-and-drop, this criteria includes
capabilities such as collaboration, data exploration and discovery, faceted navigation, guided
navigation, information workplace integration, natural language processing (NLP), and search like GUI.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Help Business User Get More Insights With Effective Data Visualizations
Agile BI wouldn’t be complete without advanced data visualization (ADV) capabilities. Older defnitions
of ADV (versus static data graphs and charts) included visual querying (without writing SQL code),
dynamic visualizations (where visualizations dynamically changed based on query results), and several
others. These features, however, are table stakes in all modern BI platforms and no longer differentiate
one vendor from another. Today we look for differentiated ADV capabilities such as:
› Richness of ADV content. What are the BI platform ADV capabilities in terms of richness of data
visualization content like graphs and charts that are available out of the box? This includes such
capabilities as cockpit gauges, custom charts and maps, geospatial representations, and infographics.
› Data visualization effectiveness. What are the BI platform ADV capabilities in terms of allowing
business users to effciently and effectively visualize data sets and act on the results? This includes
capabilities such as animations, autosuggestions, modes of interaction with data visualizations,
multiple dimensions (visualizing more than several data attributes at a time), and storyboarding.
Autosuggestions is a top differentiator in ADV these days. Look for capabilities that help the
user select the best possible visualization or chart type. Can the system analyze the input data,
recognize the pattern and key feld, and automatically propose a “best practice” visualization for an
individual data set?
Look For Technology Professionals To Provide Additional Features
Even though Agile BI is mostly all about business user self-suffciency, do not overlook the fact that
AD&D pros still need to develop, customize, deploy, and support multiple BI capabilities. Look for BI
platform features that can empower AD&D pros to:
› Deploy BI platforms and applications. What are the capabilities that AD&D pros will need to
deploy and support BI platforms and applications more effciently? These include BI platform
features such as monitoring and selectively productionalizing user-generated applications,
analyzing the impact of changes of any BI component on all others, deploying data architecture
that supports data virtualization and drill anywhere, as well as monitoring and enforcing SLAs.
› Customize BI applications. What are the capabilities that AD&D pros will need to customize BI
applications? These include BI platform features such as actionable BI (integration with ERP and
CRM metadata, native BPM capabilities, certifed integration with BPM and BRE platforms, write
back to a DW, ERP, CRM applications), cascading parameters and nested prompts, contextual BI
(embedding BI into an offce or a transactional application), guided navigation (AKA report building
wizards), and parameterized reporting.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Agile BI Platforms Evaluation Overview
To assess the state of the Agile BI platforms market and see how the vendors stack up against each
other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top Agile BI platforms vendors.
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we
developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 15 criteria, which
we grouped into three high-level buckets:
› Current offering. We assessed each vendor’s current offering by considering all of the features and
capabilities reviewed above. We also evaluated a short demonstration by each vendor outlining its
key capabilities and surveyed a total of 29 vendor customers.
› Strategy. We reviewed each vendor’s strategy and considered how well each vendor’s plans for
product enhancement position it to meet future customer demands. We also looked at the fnancial
and human resources the company has available to support its strategy.
› Market presence. In this particular research, we only considered vendor BI revenues and number
of customers as a measure of global market presence. For a more comprehensive market presence
analysis, please refer to the “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms,
Q1 2015” where we combined information about each vendor’s fnancial performance, installed
customer base, and number of employees across major geographical regions with information
about its partnership ecosystem and its horizontal and vertical industry applications.
2
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To Support Complex Agile BI Requirements
Forrester included 13 vendors in the assessment: Birst, GoodData, IBM, Information Builders,
Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, and TIBCO
Software. Unlike the Enterprise BI Wave evaluation where we consider and evaluate the entire suites
of relevant BI products, in the current Forrester Wave we only evaluated one BI tool per vendor (see
Figure 3). Each of these products has:
› Architecture that can query DBMS using SQL and MDX.
› Technology that can analyze data from multiple sources, not just a single ERP app.
› Customers that use these products for more than one business domain (for example, not just
marketing analytics).
› Frequent interest from Forrester clients in the form of questions about or mentions of a vendor in
the context of inquiries about BI.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
› Status as a top 13 software product by Agile BI revenue and market presence as indicated by
interest from Forrester clients.
› A version that was generally available by September, 2015.
The market is by no means limited to these top 13 vendors. Forrester encourages AD&D pros to
consider a much longer list of more than 50 vendors and use Forrester recommended methodology to
short list them before using this Forrester Wave to narrow down the choices even further.
3
FIGURE 3 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information
Vendor
GoodData
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
Panorama
Qlik
SAP
SAS
TIBCO Software
Product
GoodData
IBM Watson Analytics
WebFOCUS InfoAssist/InfoDiscovery
Power BI
MicroStrategy 10
Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service
Panorama Necto
Qlik Sense Enterprise
Lumira
SAS Visual Analytics
Spotfre
Version
1.3.x
8.1.04
Sept. 2015
10
Sept. 2015
15.1
2.1
V. 1.28
7.3
7.0
Sept. 2015
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Agile BI Is A Buyer’s Market That Offers Plenty Of Choices
The evaluation uncovered a market in which (see Figure 4):
› Agile BI buyers are in great hands with nine market Leaders. Microsoft, SAP, Qlik,
MicroStrategy, TIBCO Software, SAS, GoodData, Oracle, and Tableau Software lead the Agile BI
pack. While many Agile BI platform features are becoming commoditized, it’s not the individual
capabilities that differentiate the Leaders, but rather the completeness, comprehensiveness,
and integration of the entire suite of agile capabilities that sets the Leaders apart from the rest of
the vendors in this category. While many of the Leaders appear to be closely grouped, each of
them differentiates itself in terms of specifc individual capabilities. For example, in this research,
Forrester found that deploying BI apps by AD&D pros, effective UI, and ADV functionality appear
to be evenly supported by all of the vendors. However, BI application customization by AD&D pros,
self-provisioning of BI applications and data, data integration, automation, and ADV content vary
signifcantly among the vendors.
› Panorama Software, Information Builders, IBM, and Birst offer competitive options. Vendors
in the Leaders category can by no means rest easy: the Strong Performers are hot on their heels,
including some of the Agile BI newcomers from the earlier generation enterprise BI market. In
many specialized situations, these vendors can even outperform the Leaders. Some of the
Strong Performers even received higher scores in customer feedback. Effective user interface
and ADV functionality is where Forrester fnds the smallest gaps between the Leaders and the
Strong Performers.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 4 Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 ‘15
Challengers Contenders Leaders
Strong
Performers
Strategy Weak Strong
Current
offering
Weak
Strong
Go to Forrester.com to
download the Forrester
Wave tool for more
detailed product
evaluations, feature
comparisons, and
customizable rankings.
Market presence
Full vendor participation
Incomplete vendor participation
GoodData
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
Panorama
Qlik
SAP
SAS
TIBCO
Software
Tableau
Birst
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 4 Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 ‘15 (Cont.)
CURRENT OFFERING
IT-enabled features
Self-service features
Data visualization
STRATEGY
Vendor commitment
Vision and strategy
Client feedback
MARKET PRESENCE
Market presence
2.49
2.20
2.75
2.50
3.40
4.00
3.00
5.00
2.00
2.00
3.80
4.10
3.75
3.60
3.60
5.00
3.00
5.00
2.00
2.00
F
o
r
r
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s
t
e
r
’
s
W
e
i
g
h
t
i
n
g
50%
30%
30%
40%
50%
20%
70%
10%
0%
100%
2.95
3.90
2.60
2.50
3.50
5.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
2.00
4.34
4.70
3.75
4.50
4.10
1.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
3.90
4.70
3.50
3.60
3.60
2.00
4.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
4.07
4.70
4.20
3.50
3.10
3.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
2.00
3.67
3.80
3.10
4.00
3.10
3.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
2.00
4.12
4.50
3.75
4.10
3.70
2.00
4.00
5.00
5.00
5.00
3.93
3.90
4.00
3.90
4.30
2.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
3.32
2.60
3.00
4.10
4.10
4.00
4.00
5.00
3.00
3.00
3.69
4.00
3.50
3.60
3.80
3.00
4.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
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Vendor Profles
Leaders
› Microsoft Power BI leads the Agile BI pack. Throughout the history of the BI market, Microsoft
has dominated and will continue to dominate the market with Excel, the de facto and most
commonly used BI platform around the globe. Indeed, with every new release of its BI platform,
Microsoft makes it more diffcult for large enterprises that have already deployed Microsoft Offce,
Offce365, SharePoint, and SQL Server not to consider Power BI as its enterprise BI platform.
Familiar Excel UI, agile in-memory PowerPivot architecture, hybrid (on premises SQLServer-based
data, cloud-based Power BI platform) deployment, completeness of BI functionality (from data
sourcing to visual storytelling), and low acquisition cost differentiate Power BI from its competition.
Work with a trusted Microsoft implementation partner to increase chances for success.
Buyers should be aware that Microsoft only provides direct presales/post-sales support to a
handful of its top accounts. All other organizations should frst secure a trusted relationship with a
Microsoft implementation partner before committing to Power BI.
› Lumira makes SAP a formidable leader in Agile BI. Under the covers, SAP Lumira data
architecture is based on an index. Such architecture gives Lumira users extra fexibility to slice and
dice the data with few of the limitations that are usually imposed by relational or multidimensional
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
data models. In addition to providing a highly fexible UI, Lumira was one of the pioneers of
data preparation functionality built right into the tool, reducing dependency on third-party data
integration platforms. Lumira comes in fve favors: a desktop version that serves as a business
user sandbox; a server version that supports collaboration in departmental and workgroup
applications; a server version for the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, which can export Lumira
content to the rest of the SAP BusinessObjects suite; Lumira Cloud for cloud-based BI applications
and outside-of-the-frewall data distribution; and Lumira in Hana for highly scalable large
enterprise deployments. These options support the “start small, think big” approach — one of BI
deployment’s best practices.
Buyers need to get comfortable with SAP multiproduct approach to BI. One concern that
Forrester often hears about SAP is that innovation and functional richness sometimes trump
product-to-product integration; customers still face multiple user interfaces and cannot reuse some
objects across various products within the SAP BusinessObjects suite. Additionally, Forrester is not
aware of a critical mass of Lumira deployments in non-SAP-centric organizations, and therefore
cannot confrm the level of SAP customer support in such deployments.
› Qlik continues to be a top client choice for self-service data exploration. Data visualization is
a hot buzzword these days, but it’s no panacea. Most data visualization tools rely on underlying
relational or multidimensional data models, limiting them to answering questions prebuilt into
the data models. Qlik Sense 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 information just by typing in a few characters,
words, or sentences (in addition to the standard point-and-click operations). Qlik’s native in-
memory architecture allows business users to interactively analyze the data with very low latency
(Qlik Sense also offers a pass through mode where it can combine in-memory data with database
based queries). Qlik has recently closed some of the gaps in its BI portfolio with the Qlik Sense
cloud-based platform.
Supplement Qlik deployment with compensating large enterprise data management. Forrester
clients occasionally express concern that Qlik Sense and other BI platforms with roots based on
desktop architecture are more challenging to manage across large enterprise deployments than
BI platforms with enterprise roots, shared semantic data layers, and relational online analytical
processing (ROLAP) architecture. Forrester recommends that clients using Qlik Sense develop
compensating processes and controls (in the data integration and data management layers) to
ensure reusability and uniform usage of enterprise data assets.
› MicroStrategy leads the market with seamlessly integrated Agile BI suite. MicroStrategy’s
purely organic growth resulted in a single seamlessly integrated BI platform that includes all of
the components necessary for Agile and enterprise BI: desktop, server, cloud, and mobile. All
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
components are organically integrated, can share content, and use the same UI. This seamless
integration allows business users to build applications in MicroStrategy Desktop or Cloud, which
technology professionals can then migrate to the enterprise server platform for application sharing,
scalability, and control. Unlike BI platforms with desktop and departmental roots, MicroStrategy
is based on a large enterprise grade relational online analytical processing (OLAP) engine with
drill-anywhere capability. Such architecture allows enterprises to reduce siloed BI applications,
consolidate BI semantic layer, and, in the end, achieve lower long-term total cost of ownership.
Buyers should ensure they can access a pool of local MicroStrategy resources. Even though
MicroStrategy is a relatively large vendor with a global network of partners, large global enterprise
buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local MicroStrategy resources.
› TIBCO Spot?re leads with advanced data visualization — a space shuttle of Agile BI. Agile
BI does not have to stop at just data exploration and visualization. TIBCO looks beyond these
increasingly commoditized capabilities by embedding advanced predictive (based on its native S
and open source R) and streaming analytics into Spotfre and integrating Spotfre with the rest of its
data and process management software portfolio, including real-time event processing technology.
Spotfre’s native in-memory architecture allows business users to interactively analyze the data with
very low latency (Spotfre also offers a pass through mode where it can combine in-memory data
with database based queries). TIBCO’s rich set of APIs and business process management tools
make Spotfre a leading vendor to support clients’ systems of insight capabilities with embedded,
pervasive, and actionable BI.
4
Complement Spot?re deployment with integrated large enterprise data management. Forrester
clients occasionally express concern that Spotfre and other BI platforms with roots based on desktop
architecture are more challenging to manage across large enterprise deployments than BI platforms
with enterprise roots, shared semantic data layers, and ROLAP architecture. Forrester recommends
that clients using Spotfre develop compensating processes and controls (in the data integration and
data management layers) to ensure reusability and uniform usage of enterprise data assets.
Additionally, even though Spotfre is part of TIBCO with a global network of partners, large global
enterprise buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local Spotfre resources.
› SAS, a global leader in advanced analytics, now offers a top Agile BI platform. SAS has built
on its traditional strengths in advanced predictive analytics platform plus vertical industry and
business domain specifc advanced analytics applications with a formidable Agile BI product —
Visual Analytics, available both as on-premises licensed software or in the cloud via SAS Visual
Analytics for SAS Cloud (SaaS). While other Agile BI tools may be limited in their performance and
scalability by the underlying database performance or the amount of data that can ft into memory
on a single desktop or a server, Visual Analytics is based on an in-memory data grid engine,
LASR. The pure in-memory architecture makes Visual Analytics highly scalable and allows users to
visualize and analyze data interactively, with very low latency.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Buyers need to adjust to SAS server-only architecture and non-transparent prices. A few
concerns about SAS Visual Analytics include an absence of a full client “sandbox” offering, lack
of commercial pricing transparency (SAS makes government and some cloud pricing publicly
available), and a failure to offer perpetual software licenses.
› GoodData leads the market with “insights as a service.” GoodData appeals to buyers who
are looking for a single Agile and integrated enterprise end-to-end BI platform that resides in
the cloud, and therefore, takes the burden of maintenance, support, and upgrades away from
enterprise technology professionals. In the latest release, GoodData introduced an innovative and
differentiated capability that it calls “insights as a service.” Its engine understands the context
of your problem and generates the most likely path to the next insight, based on the collective
intelligence developed from millions of GoodData community interactions. For example, a mouse
hovering over a sales pipeline metric will automatically generate a dashboard analyzing the metric
(a single click to a dashboard) and then suggest the next step such as drilling down a time, region,
or a customer segment dimension.
Be cautious if your use case calls for hybrid on-premises and cloud deployment. GoodData
works best with cloud data sources because even on-premises data still needs to be moved to the
cloud in the GoodData environment (so GoodData is not a good option for clients looking for hybrid
cloud and on-premises deployments). Because GoodData is still a relatively small vendor, large
global enterprise buyers should also perform due diligence on the availability of local GoodData
resources if they are looking to use GoodData as BI development PaaS.
› Oracle is the new 800lb gorilla in the Agile BI market. Oracle BI Enterprise Edition — OBIEE —
has always been a formidable market leader in enterprise BI. ROLAP-based BI Server for complex
large enterprise deployments and common metadata shared by OBIEE, Oracle ERP/CRM, and
Oracle’s industry and business domain focused BI applications have set Oracle BI apart from
the competition for years. There was only one gap in OBIEE — few Agile BI capabilities. In 2015,
Oracle closed the gap and hit the ground running with its Agile cloud BI offering — Oracle BI Cloud
Services (OBICS). OBICS will appeal to buyers who are looking for a single Agile and integrated
enterprise end-to-end BI platform that is residing in the cloud, and therefore, taking the burden
of maintenance, support, and upgrades away from enterprise technology professionals. It will be
especially attractive to buyers who also have a use case to implement Oracle cloud databases and
Oracle cloud BI applications.
Be prudent if your use case calls for hybrid on-premises and cloud deployment. OBICS works
best with cloud data sources because even on-premises data still needs to be moved to the cloud
and into the OBICS environment.
› Tableau Software continues to lead the market with highly effective data visualization.
Building effective data visualization requires much more than just technology. Very few BI
developers and business analysts have a background in graphical design and data visualization
science. Rather than struggling with custom coding and designing an effective visualization,
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
users and developers can rely on Tableau to have already incorporated all of the best practices
into the platform. As a result, Forrester clients often choose Tableau because they perceive the
vendor as a thought and market leader in self-service agile data visualization. Tableau is the only
vendor Forrester is aware of that received HichertIBCS Certifcation for International Business
Communications Standards.
5
Tableau has recently introduced a unique and highly differentiated
feature it calls Level Of Detail (LOD) that allows analysis and visualizations to be performed at
different levels of aggregation and granularity.
Supplement Tableau deployment with integrated enterprise data management. Forrester
clients often express concern that Tableau and other BI vendors with roots based on desktop
architecture are more challenging to manage across a large enterprise deployment than BI
platforms with enterprise roots, semantic data layers, and ROLAP architecture. Forrester
recommends that clients using Tableau Software develop compensating processes and controls
(in the data integration and data management layers) to ensure reusability and uniform usage of
enterprise data assets.
Strong Performers
› Panorama offers “cool” Agile BI features on top of a Microsoft BI stack. If you are in the
market for collaborative BI and are looking for features like report and dashboard annotations,
discussion threads, and social tagging and ranking of BI content, look no further than Panorama
Software Necto. Necto then takes collaborative BI to the next level with a “suggestive BI” engine
that recommends most relevant BI content based on popular usage by your peers. Because Necto
leverages the power of Microsoft SQLServer Analysis Services as its underlying architecture, it
is also a great add-on to anyone who’s committed to a Microsoft software stack, but needs an
extra “oomph” in data visualization and collaboration functionality (although it can connect to and
analyze data from any source including non-Microsoft data sources).
Buyers should ensure they have access to a pool of local Panorama resources. Panorama
is a relatively small vendor; buyers should perform due diligence on the availability of local
Necto resources.
› Information Builders challenges Agile BI vendors with InfoAssist and InfoDiscovery.
Information Builders, a market leader in enterprise BI with a highly scalable WebFOCUS platform,
enters the Agile BI market with two products: InfoAssist and InfoDiscovery. InfoAssist is a business
user tool for creating analytical InfoApps, including InfoApps that use WebFOCUS Active Technology
that allows for seamless (just pull the cord) offine operation by constantly caching HTML data
behind the scenes. While InfoAssist relies on the WebFOCUS semantic model, InfoDiscovery will
appeal to business users who just want to pull and analyze data from any source without having to
go through the process of building a semantic model. Because both InfoDiscovery and InfoAssist
use WebFOCUS metadata across the entire infrastructure, WebFOCUS Portal can assemble multiple
InfoApps and InfoDiscovery built content into a single dashboard.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Buyers should ensure they can access a pool of local WebFOCUS resources. Even though
Information Builders is a relatively large vendor with a global network of partners, large global
enterprise buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local WebFocus resources.
› IBM is bridging the Agile BI and cognitive computing gap with Watson Analytics. IBM recently
introduced Watson Analytics, a cloud-based governed data discovery platform. Sharing cognitive
elements with Watson technology, Watson Analytics aims to overcome the skills gap that often
makes data exploration and analysis inaccessible to non-experts. It provides features such as
a natural language processing (NLP) interface that is used for the following: to locate the most
relevant data; for semantic and statistical analysis of the data to ensure intuitive and relevant
visualizations; for prebuilt analytic functions — from forecasting algorithms to flters — that are
surfaced without any technical jargon and presented to the user in plain business language; for
automatic detection of important relationships in the data, through advanced analytics; and to
surface insights and encourage further exploration.
Use Watson Analytics for speci?c apps, not (yet) as a full enterprise BI platform. IBM
Watson Analytics is a growing and evolving product with continuous delivery of new capabilities
such as integration with IBM DataWorks and Cognos. However, at the time of this evaluation, it
had limitations, such as connectivity to only one data source at a time and no full-client software,
which limit Watson Analytics’ functionality in an offine mode. For large enterprise deployments,
complement Watson Analytics with the next release of IBM Cognos (not evaluated in this Wave
evaluation). IBM Cognos has been redesigned for Agile BI and uses built-in Watson-based
intelligence to help access and shape all types of data and author and share content over
an enterprise BI and analytics platform. It uses automated modeling and shares an intuitive
dashboarding experience with Watson Analytics.
› Birst offers cloud-based Agile and large enterprise grade BI with exclusive features. In
addition to crossing most of the t’s and dotting most of the i’s of self-service Agile BI and data
visualization, Birst offers a few truly unique features. First, Birst can automatically generate a
dimensional model reducing the need for expensive, highly trained data modelers. Next, Birst’s
underlying ROLAP — not unique in the enterprise BI landscape, but seldom seen in the Agile BI
platforms — has declarative capabilities that support metadata and data reuse versus building
siloed applications and includes large enterprise performance enhancing capabilities like multitiered
caching and aggregate awareness. Last but not least, unlike other cloud-based solutions, Birst
does not require all data to be moved to cloud. Instead, Birst can directly query data on premises
and combine it with analytic-ready data in the Birst cloud via query federation that supports a
combination of hybrid cloud plus on-premises deployment scenarios.
Buyers should ensure they have access to a pool of local Birst resources. Birst is still a
relatively small vendor so large global enterprise buyers should also perform due diligence on the
availability of local Birst resources in case they are looking to use Birst as a BI development PaaS.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Supplemental Material
Online Resource
The online version of Figure 4 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 of three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each
solution:
› Vendor surveys. Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation
criteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where
necessary to gather details of vendor qualifcations.
› Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their product’s functionality. We
used fndings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.
› Customer reference surveys. To validate product and vendor qualifcations, Forrester also
surveyed a total of 29 of the vendors’ current customers.
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The Forrester Wave Methodology
We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated in this
market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our fnal list. We choose these vendors based
on: 1) product ft; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate vendors that have
limited customer references and products that don’t ft the scope of our evaluation.
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop
the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria,
we gather details of product qualifcations through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires,
demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review,
and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.
We set default weightings to refect our analysis of the needs of large user companies — and/or other
scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document — and then score the vendors based on a
clearly defned scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we encourage
readers to adapt the weightings to ft their individual needs through the Excel-based tool. The fnal
scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering, strategy, and market
presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product capabilities and vendor
strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every Forrester Wave follows, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester- wave-methodology.html.
Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2014, was felded to 1,658
business and technology decision-makers located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France,
Germany, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the US from SMB and enterprise companies with 100
or more employees. This survey is part of Forrester’s Business Technographics and was felded
from January 2014 to March 2014. ResearchNow felded this survey on behalf of Forrester. Survey
respondent incentives include points redeemable for gift certifcates. We have provided exact sample
sizes in this report on a question-by question basis.
Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2015, was felded from
January through March 2015 of 3,005 business and technology decision-makers located in Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States from
companies with 100 or more employees.
Forrester’s Business Technographics provides demand-side insight into the priorities, investments, and
customer journeys of business and technology decision-makers and the workforce across the globe.
Forrester collects data insights from qualifed respondents in 10 countries spanning the Americas,
Europe, and Asia. Business Technographics uses only superior data sources and advanced data-
cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.
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Integrity Policy
All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Waves, is conducted according to our Integrity Policy.
For more information, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.
Endnotes
1
These are estimates based on ranges and are not exact. Source: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Data
And Analytics Survey, 2015.
2
In Forrester’s 60-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we identifed the 11 most
signifcant software providers and researched, analyzed, and scored their current market offerings. This report details
our fndings about how well each vendor fulflls Forrester’s evaluation criteria and where they stand in relation to each
other to help application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right vendor for their enterprise BI
platform. See the “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q1 2015” Forrester report.
3
Forrester has created a pragmatic tool clients can use to categorize and shortlist the large BI market based on specifc
needs. See the “Forrester’s 10-Step Methodology For Shortlisting Business Intelligence Vendors” Forrester report.
4
Business intelligence (BI) must keep evolving, improving, and adapting to key business agility trends in the age of the
customer. Its next evolution? Systems of insight. This report connects the dots between our research on BI, Agile BI,
and big data; proposes best practices for merging previously separate efforts into a more cohesive system of insight
strategy; and offers actionable advice for AD&D pros working on BI and big data initiatives on supercharging BI and
upgrading to 21st-century systems of insight. See the “It’s Time To Upgrade Business Intelligence To Systems Of
Insight” Forrester report.
5
Referencehttp://www.tableau.com/about/press-releases/2015/tableau-awarded-hichertribcs-certifcation-
international-business
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116447
doc_904125210.pdf
In Forresters 15-criteria evaluation of Agile business intelligence (BI) vendors.
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence
Platforms, Q3 2015
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
September 25, 2015
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
FORRESTER.COM
Key Takeaways
BI Choices Abound With Nine Leading Vendors
And Four Strong Competitors
Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which
Microsoft, SAP, Qlik, MicroStrategy, TIBCO
Software, SAS, GoodData, Oracle, and Tableau
Software lead the pack. Panorama, Information
Builders, IBM, and Birst offer competitive options.
The Agile BI Market Is Growing As AD&D Pros
Focus On Supporting Business Agility
The Agile BI market is growing because more
AD&D professionals see Agile BI platforms as a
way to address their top challenges. This market
growth is in large part due to the fact that AD&D
pros increasingly trust Agile BI providers to act as
strategic partners, advising them on top business,
data, and information agility decisions.
Business User BI Self-Service Is The Key
Differentiator In The Agile BI Market
As enterprise BI driven by technology
management becomes commoditized, features
that empower business users to be self-suffcient
will differentiate software providers. Vendors that
can deliver business user self-service features
without sacrifcing essential enterprise capabilities
will position themselves to deliver the best BI
platforms to their customers.
Why Read This Report
In Forrester’s 15-criteria evaluation of Agile
business intelligence (BI) vendors, we identifed
the 13 most signifcant software providers in the
category —Birst, GoodData, IBM, Information
Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle,
Panorama, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, and
TIBCO Software —and researched, analyzed,
and scored them. This report details our fndings
about how well each vendor fulflls our criteria
and where they stand in relation to each other
to help application development and delivery
(AD&D) professionals select the right platform for
their Agile BI requirements.
2
4
6
8
10
16
© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions refect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester
®
,
Technographics
®
, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester
Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or
distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
+1 617-613-6000 | Fax: +1 617-613-5000 | forrester.com
Table Of Contents
Agile BI Is A Key Element In The Business
Agility Equation
Agile Enterprises Need Agile BI Platforms
Everything You Wanted To Know About Agile
BI But Were Afraid To Ask
Empower Business Users To Be Self-Suffcient
Help Business User Get More Insights With
Effective Data Visualizations
Look For Technology Professionals To Provide
Additional Features
Agile BI Platforms Evaluation Overview
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering,
Strategy, And Market Presence
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To
Support Complex Agile BI Requirements
Agile BI Is A Buyer’s Market That Offers
Plenty Of Choices
Vendor Pro?les
Leaders
Strong Performers
Supplemental Material
Notes & Resources
Forrester conducted demos, briefngs, and
interviewed customer references in June 2015.
Related Research Documents
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q1 2015
Forrester’s 10-Step Methodology For Shortlisting
Business Intelligence Vendors
It’s Time For A User-Driven Enterprise BI Strategy
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
with Holger Kisker, Ph.D., Martha Bennett, Sophia Christakis, and Ian McPherson
September 25, 2015
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
September 25, 2015
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2
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Agile BI Is A Key Element In The Business Agility Equation
Customers are more and more empowered with mobile devices and cloud-based, all but unlimited
access to information about products, services, and prices. Customer stickiness is increasingly diffcult to
achieve as they demand instant gratifcation for their ever changing tastes and requirements. Switching
product and service providers is now just a matter of clicking a few keys on a mobile phone. Forrester
calls this the age of the customer, which elevates business and technology priorities to achieve:
› Business agility. Business agility often equals the ability to adopt, react, and succeed in the midst
of an unending fountain of customer driven requirements. Agile organizations make decisions
differently by embracing a new, more grass-roots-based management approach. Employees down
in the trenches, in individual business units, are the ones who are in close touch with customer
problems, market shifts, and process ineffciencies. These workers are often in the best position
to understand challenges and opportunities and to make decisions to improve the business. It is
only when responses to change come from these highly aware and empowered employees, that
enterprises become agile, competitive, and successful.
› Information agility. Agile enterprises must gather customer and market knowledge and rapidly
incorporate it into decisions. To support and promote business agility, enterprise knowledge
workers need to be empowered with easy access to agile, fexible, and responsive enterprise BI
tools and applications. Yet, while organizations of all sizes made signifcant headway over the last
two decades in their enterprise BI accomplishments, many organizations still struggle with making
their data and information management, BI, and analytics environments agile.
Agile Enterprises Need Agile BI Platforms
Alas, earlier generation BI platforms are often anything but agile. Indeed, all modern enterprise BI
platforms are scalable and robust, support and promote a single version of the truth, and minimize
operational risk. But these capabilities carry a hefty price tag of complexity, rigidity, and infexibility, and
as a result they are slow to react to constantly changing customer and business requirements. This
lack of BI agility promotes two unfortunate side effects of earlier generation BI deployments:
› Only a small percentage of enterprise data is leveraged for business insights. Only 40%
of structured, 31% of unstructured, and 27% of semistructured enterprise data is leveraged for
business intelligence and quantitative decision-making (see Figure 1).
1
› Majority of BI applications are still built by a shadow IT process. Forrester research fnds that
majority of organizations (63%) still build most (more than 50%) of the BI applications based on
desktop tools such as spreadsheets. More than a quarter of respondents (26%) share an even
more dreary story — 70% or more of all BI apps are built in a shadow IT environment (see Figure 2).
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 1 Only A Small Percentage Of Enterprise Data Is Used For Insights
Semistructured data
Base: 1,805 global technology decision-makers who
know how much BI data their frm uses
Note: The percentages shown are estimates based on reported ranges; the values are not exact.
Source: Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2015
Use
31%
Don’t use
69%
Use
27%
Don’t use
73%
Use
40%
Don’t use
60%
Unstructured data Structured data
Please estimate what percentage of the total size/volume of
data within your company your company is currently using for BI
FIGURE 2 Majority Of BI Applications Live In Shadow IT
Base: 249 North American business decision-makers
Source: Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2014
Percent of homegrown enterprise BI apps
50% + 60% + 70% + 80% + 90% + 100%
Percent responding
26% 35% 63% 15% 6% 3%
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Everything You Wanted To Know About Agile BI But Were Afraid To Ask
Point-and-click, drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces (GUIs) may be intuitive to an experienced
professional with a background in command-line interfaces but not so obvious to a millennial who grew
up with a thumb-typing mobile phone UI. And while menu- and prompt-driven instrumented (radio
buttons, dialog boxes, etc.) applications may seem user friendly to left-brained people (who think in
numbers and lists), right-brained offce workers (who see the world in pictures and associations) may
prefer an application driven by icons, visual associations, and artistic infographics. Forrester takes
a more practical approach and describes Agile BI in highly objective and quantifable terms, which
specifcally address many of the shortcomings and limitations (rigid and restrictive data models, too
much reliance on technology management professionals, and many others) of the earlier generation
enterprise BI platforms.
Empower Business Users To Be Self-Suf?cient
Core Agile BI requires capabilities that empower business users to be self-suffcient in their BI
environment with little or no involvement from technology professionals. These capabilities are typically
supported by BI platform features such as:
› Self-provisioning applications and data. How effciently can business users connect to new
data sources and provision applications, data, and resources? This includes such capabilities as
application sandboxes, data upload, data virtualization and drill anywhere, elasticity, semantic layer,
and mobile delivery.
› Data integration, mashups, and wrangling. How effciently and effectively can business users
perform various data transformation tasks? This includes capabilities such as automodeling,
calculated measures, data mashups, data wrangling, lightweight data quality functions, and write
back (changing values in a cube, data mart, datawarehouse, or transactional databases).
› BI automation. Does the BI platform support various self-service BI automation processes that
allow business users to do more with less? Beyond commoditized and nondifferentiated features
like report batches, report scheduling, etc., these features should include such capabilities as auto
information discovery, actionable BI, contextual BI, suggestive BI, and managing a full BI life cycle
with a single integrated development environment (IDE).
› Effective user interfaces. How easily can business users create their own reports and dashboards
and run data exploration and other relevant tasks? Going beyond highly commoditized and
nondifferentiated GUI features like point-and-click and drag-and-drop, this criteria includes
capabilities such as collaboration, data exploration and discovery, faceted navigation, guided
navigation, information workplace integration, natural language processing (NLP), and search like GUI.
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Help Business User Get More Insights With Effective Data Visualizations
Agile BI wouldn’t be complete without advanced data visualization (ADV) capabilities. Older defnitions
of ADV (versus static data graphs and charts) included visual querying (without writing SQL code),
dynamic visualizations (where visualizations dynamically changed based on query results), and several
others. These features, however, are table stakes in all modern BI platforms and no longer differentiate
one vendor from another. Today we look for differentiated ADV capabilities such as:
› Richness of ADV content. What are the BI platform ADV capabilities in terms of richness of data
visualization content like graphs and charts that are available out of the box? This includes such
capabilities as cockpit gauges, custom charts and maps, geospatial representations, and infographics.
› Data visualization effectiveness. What are the BI platform ADV capabilities in terms of allowing
business users to effciently and effectively visualize data sets and act on the results? This includes
capabilities such as animations, autosuggestions, modes of interaction with data visualizations,
multiple dimensions (visualizing more than several data attributes at a time), and storyboarding.
Autosuggestions is a top differentiator in ADV these days. Look for capabilities that help the
user select the best possible visualization or chart type. Can the system analyze the input data,
recognize the pattern and key feld, and automatically propose a “best practice” visualization for an
individual data set?
Look For Technology Professionals To Provide Additional Features
Even though Agile BI is mostly all about business user self-suffciency, do not overlook the fact that
AD&D pros still need to develop, customize, deploy, and support multiple BI capabilities. Look for BI
platform features that can empower AD&D pros to:
› Deploy BI platforms and applications. What are the capabilities that AD&D pros will need to
deploy and support BI platforms and applications more effciently? These include BI platform
features such as monitoring and selectively productionalizing user-generated applications,
analyzing the impact of changes of any BI component on all others, deploying data architecture
that supports data virtualization and drill anywhere, as well as monitoring and enforcing SLAs.
› Customize BI applications. What are the capabilities that AD&D pros will need to customize BI
applications? These include BI platform features such as actionable BI (integration with ERP and
CRM metadata, native BPM capabilities, certifed integration with BPM and BRE platforms, write
back to a DW, ERP, CRM applications), cascading parameters and nested prompts, contextual BI
(embedding BI into an offce or a transactional application), guided navigation (AKA report building
wizards), and parameterized reporting.
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Agile BI Platforms Evaluation Overview
To assess the state of the Agile BI platforms market and see how the vendors stack up against each
other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top Agile BI platforms vendors.
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we
developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 15 criteria, which
we grouped into three high-level buckets:
› Current offering. We assessed each vendor’s current offering by considering all of the features and
capabilities reviewed above. We also evaluated a short demonstration by each vendor outlining its
key capabilities and surveyed a total of 29 vendor customers.
› Strategy. We reviewed each vendor’s strategy and considered how well each vendor’s plans for
product enhancement position it to meet future customer demands. We also looked at the fnancial
and human resources the company has available to support its strategy.
› Market presence. In this particular research, we only considered vendor BI revenues and number
of customers as a measure of global market presence. For a more comprehensive market presence
analysis, please refer to the “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms,
Q1 2015” where we combined information about each vendor’s fnancial performance, installed
customer base, and number of employees across major geographical regions with information
about its partnership ecosystem and its horizontal and vertical industry applications.
2
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To Support Complex Agile BI Requirements
Forrester included 13 vendors in the assessment: Birst, GoodData, IBM, Information Builders,
Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, and TIBCO
Software. Unlike the Enterprise BI Wave evaluation where we consider and evaluate the entire suites
of relevant BI products, in the current Forrester Wave we only evaluated one BI tool per vendor (see
Figure 3). Each of these products has:
› Architecture that can query DBMS using SQL and MDX.
› Technology that can analyze data from multiple sources, not just a single ERP app.
› Customers that use these products for more than one business domain (for example, not just
marketing analytics).
› Frequent interest from Forrester clients in the form of questions about or mentions of a vendor in
the context of inquiries about BI.
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› Status as a top 13 software product by Agile BI revenue and market presence as indicated by
interest from Forrester clients.
› A version that was generally available by September, 2015.
The market is by no means limited to these top 13 vendors. Forrester encourages AD&D pros to
consider a much longer list of more than 50 vendors and use Forrester recommended methodology to
short list them before using this Forrester Wave to narrow down the choices even further.
3
FIGURE 3 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information
Vendor
GoodData
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
Panorama
Qlik
SAP
SAS
TIBCO Software
Product
GoodData
IBM Watson Analytics
WebFOCUS InfoAssist/InfoDiscovery
Power BI
MicroStrategy 10
Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service
Panorama Necto
Qlik Sense Enterprise
Lumira
SAS Visual Analytics
Spotfre
Version
1.3.x
8.1.04
Sept. 2015
10
Sept. 2015
15.1
2.1
V. 1.28
7.3
7.0
Sept. 2015
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Agile BI Is A Buyer’s Market That Offers Plenty Of Choices
The evaluation uncovered a market in which (see Figure 4):
› Agile BI buyers are in great hands with nine market Leaders. Microsoft, SAP, Qlik,
MicroStrategy, TIBCO Software, SAS, GoodData, Oracle, and Tableau Software lead the Agile BI
pack. While many Agile BI platform features are becoming commoditized, it’s not the individual
capabilities that differentiate the Leaders, but rather the completeness, comprehensiveness,
and integration of the entire suite of agile capabilities that sets the Leaders apart from the rest of
the vendors in this category. While many of the Leaders appear to be closely grouped, each of
them differentiates itself in terms of specifc individual capabilities. For example, in this research,
Forrester found that deploying BI apps by AD&D pros, effective UI, and ADV functionality appear
to be evenly supported by all of the vendors. However, BI application customization by AD&D pros,
self-provisioning of BI applications and data, data integration, automation, and ADV content vary
signifcantly among the vendors.
› Panorama Software, Information Builders, IBM, and Birst offer competitive options. Vendors
in the Leaders category can by no means rest easy: the Strong Performers are hot on their heels,
including some of the Agile BI newcomers from the earlier generation enterprise BI market. In
many specialized situations, these vendors can even outperform the Leaders. Some of the
Strong Performers even received higher scores in customer feedback. Effective user interface
and ADV functionality is where Forrester fnds the smallest gaps between the Leaders and the
Strong Performers.
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The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
FIGURE 4 Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 ‘15
Challengers Contenders Leaders
Strong
Performers
Strategy Weak Strong
Current
offering
Weak
Strong
Go to Forrester.com to
download the Forrester
Wave tool for more
detailed product
evaluations, feature
comparisons, and
customizable rankings.
Market presence
Full vendor participation
Incomplete vendor participation
GoodData
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
Panorama
Qlik
SAP
SAS
TIBCO
Software
Tableau
Birst
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FIGURE 4 Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 ‘15 (Cont.)
CURRENT OFFERING
IT-enabled features
Self-service features
Data visualization
STRATEGY
Vendor commitment
Vision and strategy
Client feedback
MARKET PRESENCE
Market presence
2.49
2.20
2.75
2.50
3.40
4.00
3.00
5.00
2.00
2.00
3.80
4.10
3.75
3.60
3.60
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2.95
3.90
2.60
2.50
3.50
5.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
2.00
4.34
4.70
3.75
4.50
4.10
1.00
5.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
3.90
4.70
3.50
3.60
3.60
2.00
4.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
4.07
4.70
4.20
3.50
3.10
3.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
2.00
3.67
3.80
3.10
4.00
3.10
3.00
3.00
4.00
2.00
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4.12
4.50
3.75
4.10
3.70
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3.93
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4.30
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3.32
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4.10
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3.00
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3.69
4.00
3.50
3.60
3.80
3.00
4.00
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All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
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Vendor Profles
Leaders
› Microsoft Power BI leads the Agile BI pack. Throughout the history of the BI market, Microsoft
has dominated and will continue to dominate the market with Excel, the de facto and most
commonly used BI platform around the globe. Indeed, with every new release of its BI platform,
Microsoft makes it more diffcult for large enterprises that have already deployed Microsoft Offce,
Offce365, SharePoint, and SQL Server not to consider Power BI as its enterprise BI platform.
Familiar Excel UI, agile in-memory PowerPivot architecture, hybrid (on premises SQLServer-based
data, cloud-based Power BI platform) deployment, completeness of BI functionality (from data
sourcing to visual storytelling), and low acquisition cost differentiate Power BI from its competition.
Work with a trusted Microsoft implementation partner to increase chances for success.
Buyers should be aware that Microsoft only provides direct presales/post-sales support to a
handful of its top accounts. All other organizations should frst secure a trusted relationship with a
Microsoft implementation partner before committing to Power BI.
› Lumira makes SAP a formidable leader in Agile BI. Under the covers, SAP Lumira data
architecture is based on an index. Such architecture gives Lumira users extra fexibility to slice and
dice the data with few of the limitations that are usually imposed by relational or multidimensional
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data models. In addition to providing a highly fexible UI, Lumira was one of the pioneers of
data preparation functionality built right into the tool, reducing dependency on third-party data
integration platforms. Lumira comes in fve favors: a desktop version that serves as a business
user sandbox; a server version that supports collaboration in departmental and workgroup
applications; a server version for the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, which can export Lumira
content to the rest of the SAP BusinessObjects suite; Lumira Cloud for cloud-based BI applications
and outside-of-the-frewall data distribution; and Lumira in Hana for highly scalable large
enterprise deployments. These options support the “start small, think big” approach — one of BI
deployment’s best practices.
Buyers need to get comfortable with SAP multiproduct approach to BI. One concern that
Forrester often hears about SAP is that innovation and functional richness sometimes trump
product-to-product integration; customers still face multiple user interfaces and cannot reuse some
objects across various products within the SAP BusinessObjects suite. Additionally, Forrester is not
aware of a critical mass of Lumira deployments in non-SAP-centric organizations, and therefore
cannot confrm the level of SAP customer support in such deployments.
› Qlik continues to be a top client choice for self-service data exploration. Data visualization is
a hot buzzword these days, but it’s no panacea. Most data visualization tools rely on underlying
relational or multidimensional data models, limiting them to answering questions prebuilt into
the data models. Qlik Sense 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 information just by typing in a few characters,
words, or sentences (in addition to the standard point-and-click operations). Qlik’s native in-
memory architecture allows business users to interactively analyze the data with very low latency
(Qlik Sense also offers a pass through mode where it can combine in-memory data with database
based queries). Qlik has recently closed some of the gaps in its BI portfolio with the Qlik Sense
cloud-based platform.
Supplement Qlik deployment with compensating large enterprise data management. Forrester
clients occasionally express concern that Qlik Sense and other BI platforms with roots based on
desktop architecture are more challenging to manage across large enterprise deployments than
BI platforms with enterprise roots, shared semantic data layers, and relational online analytical
processing (ROLAP) architecture. Forrester recommends that clients using Qlik Sense develop
compensating processes and controls (in the data integration and data management layers) to
ensure reusability and uniform usage of enterprise data assets.
› MicroStrategy leads the market with seamlessly integrated Agile BI suite. MicroStrategy’s
purely organic growth resulted in a single seamlessly integrated BI platform that includes all of
the components necessary for Agile and enterprise BI: desktop, server, cloud, and mobile. All
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components are organically integrated, can share content, and use the same UI. This seamless
integration allows business users to build applications in MicroStrategy Desktop or Cloud, which
technology professionals can then migrate to the enterprise server platform for application sharing,
scalability, and control. Unlike BI platforms with desktop and departmental roots, MicroStrategy
is based on a large enterprise grade relational online analytical processing (OLAP) engine with
drill-anywhere capability. Such architecture allows enterprises to reduce siloed BI applications,
consolidate BI semantic layer, and, in the end, achieve lower long-term total cost of ownership.
Buyers should ensure they can access a pool of local MicroStrategy resources. Even though
MicroStrategy is a relatively large vendor with a global network of partners, large global enterprise
buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local MicroStrategy resources.
› TIBCO Spot?re leads with advanced data visualization — a space shuttle of Agile BI. Agile
BI does not have to stop at just data exploration and visualization. TIBCO looks beyond these
increasingly commoditized capabilities by embedding advanced predictive (based on its native S
and open source R) and streaming analytics into Spotfre and integrating Spotfre with the rest of its
data and process management software portfolio, including real-time event processing technology.
Spotfre’s native in-memory architecture allows business users to interactively analyze the data with
very low latency (Spotfre also offers a pass through mode where it can combine in-memory data
with database based queries). TIBCO’s rich set of APIs and business process management tools
make Spotfre a leading vendor to support clients’ systems of insight capabilities with embedded,
pervasive, and actionable BI.
4
Complement Spot?re deployment with integrated large enterprise data management. Forrester
clients occasionally express concern that Spotfre and other BI platforms with roots based on desktop
architecture are more challenging to manage across large enterprise deployments than BI platforms
with enterprise roots, shared semantic data layers, and ROLAP architecture. Forrester recommends
that clients using Spotfre develop compensating processes and controls (in the data integration and
data management layers) to ensure reusability and uniform usage of enterprise data assets.
Additionally, even though Spotfre is part of TIBCO with a global network of partners, large global
enterprise buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local Spotfre resources.
› SAS, a global leader in advanced analytics, now offers a top Agile BI platform. SAS has built
on its traditional strengths in advanced predictive analytics platform plus vertical industry and
business domain specifc advanced analytics applications with a formidable Agile BI product —
Visual Analytics, available both as on-premises licensed software or in the cloud via SAS Visual
Analytics for SAS Cloud (SaaS). While other Agile BI tools may be limited in their performance and
scalability by the underlying database performance or the amount of data that can ft into memory
on a single desktop or a server, Visual Analytics is based on an in-memory data grid engine,
LASR. The pure in-memory architecture makes Visual Analytics highly scalable and allows users to
visualize and analyze data interactively, with very low latency.
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Buyers need to adjust to SAS server-only architecture and non-transparent prices. A few
concerns about SAS Visual Analytics include an absence of a full client “sandbox” offering, lack
of commercial pricing transparency (SAS makes government and some cloud pricing publicly
available), and a failure to offer perpetual software licenses.
› GoodData leads the market with “insights as a service.” GoodData appeals to buyers who
are looking for a single Agile and integrated enterprise end-to-end BI platform that resides in
the cloud, and therefore, takes the burden of maintenance, support, and upgrades away from
enterprise technology professionals. In the latest release, GoodData introduced an innovative and
differentiated capability that it calls “insights as a service.” Its engine understands the context
of your problem and generates the most likely path to the next insight, based on the collective
intelligence developed from millions of GoodData community interactions. For example, a mouse
hovering over a sales pipeline metric will automatically generate a dashboard analyzing the metric
(a single click to a dashboard) and then suggest the next step such as drilling down a time, region,
or a customer segment dimension.
Be cautious if your use case calls for hybrid on-premises and cloud deployment. GoodData
works best with cloud data sources because even on-premises data still needs to be moved to the
cloud in the GoodData environment (so GoodData is not a good option for clients looking for hybrid
cloud and on-premises deployments). Because GoodData is still a relatively small vendor, large
global enterprise buyers should also perform due diligence on the availability of local GoodData
resources if they are looking to use GoodData as BI development PaaS.
› Oracle is the new 800lb gorilla in the Agile BI market. Oracle BI Enterprise Edition — OBIEE —
has always been a formidable market leader in enterprise BI. ROLAP-based BI Server for complex
large enterprise deployments and common metadata shared by OBIEE, Oracle ERP/CRM, and
Oracle’s industry and business domain focused BI applications have set Oracle BI apart from
the competition for years. There was only one gap in OBIEE — few Agile BI capabilities. In 2015,
Oracle closed the gap and hit the ground running with its Agile cloud BI offering — Oracle BI Cloud
Services (OBICS). OBICS will appeal to buyers who are looking for a single Agile and integrated
enterprise end-to-end BI platform that is residing in the cloud, and therefore, taking the burden
of maintenance, support, and upgrades away from enterprise technology professionals. It will be
especially attractive to buyers who also have a use case to implement Oracle cloud databases and
Oracle cloud BI applications.
Be prudent if your use case calls for hybrid on-premises and cloud deployment. OBICS works
best with cloud data sources because even on-premises data still needs to be moved to the cloud
and into the OBICS environment.
› Tableau Software continues to lead the market with highly effective data visualization.
Building effective data visualization requires much more than just technology. Very few BI
developers and business analysts have a background in graphical design and data visualization
science. Rather than struggling with custom coding and designing an effective visualization,
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users and developers can rely on Tableau to have already incorporated all of the best practices
into the platform. As a result, Forrester clients often choose Tableau because they perceive the
vendor as a thought and market leader in self-service agile data visualization. Tableau is the only
vendor Forrester is aware of that received HichertIBCS Certifcation for International Business
Communications Standards.
5
Tableau has recently introduced a unique and highly differentiated
feature it calls Level Of Detail (LOD) that allows analysis and visualizations to be performed at
different levels of aggregation and granularity.
Supplement Tableau deployment with integrated enterprise data management. Forrester
clients often express concern that Tableau and other BI vendors with roots based on desktop
architecture are more challenging to manage across a large enterprise deployment than BI
platforms with enterprise roots, semantic data layers, and ROLAP architecture. Forrester
recommends that clients using Tableau Software develop compensating processes and controls
(in the data integration and data management layers) to ensure reusability and uniform usage of
enterprise data assets.
Strong Performers
› Panorama offers “cool” Agile BI features on top of a Microsoft BI stack. If you are in the
market for collaborative BI and are looking for features like report and dashboard annotations,
discussion threads, and social tagging and ranking of BI content, look no further than Panorama
Software Necto. Necto then takes collaborative BI to the next level with a “suggestive BI” engine
that recommends most relevant BI content based on popular usage by your peers. Because Necto
leverages the power of Microsoft SQLServer Analysis Services as its underlying architecture, it
is also a great add-on to anyone who’s committed to a Microsoft software stack, but needs an
extra “oomph” in data visualization and collaboration functionality (although it can connect to and
analyze data from any source including non-Microsoft data sources).
Buyers should ensure they have access to a pool of local Panorama resources. Panorama
is a relatively small vendor; buyers should perform due diligence on the availability of local
Necto resources.
› Information Builders challenges Agile BI vendors with InfoAssist and InfoDiscovery.
Information Builders, a market leader in enterprise BI with a highly scalable WebFOCUS platform,
enters the Agile BI market with two products: InfoAssist and InfoDiscovery. InfoAssist is a business
user tool for creating analytical InfoApps, including InfoApps that use WebFOCUS Active Technology
that allows for seamless (just pull the cord) offine operation by constantly caching HTML data
behind the scenes. While InfoAssist relies on the WebFOCUS semantic model, InfoDiscovery will
appeal to business users who just want to pull and analyze data from any source without having to
go through the process of building a semantic model. Because both InfoDiscovery and InfoAssist
use WebFOCUS metadata across the entire infrastructure, WebFOCUS Portal can assemble multiple
InfoApps and InfoDiscovery built content into a single dashboard.
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Buyers should ensure they can access a pool of local WebFOCUS resources. Even though
Information Builders is a relatively large vendor with a global network of partners, large global
enterprise buyers should still perform due diligence on the availability of local WebFocus resources.
› IBM is bridging the Agile BI and cognitive computing gap with Watson Analytics. IBM recently
introduced Watson Analytics, a cloud-based governed data discovery platform. Sharing cognitive
elements with Watson technology, Watson Analytics aims to overcome the skills gap that often
makes data exploration and analysis inaccessible to non-experts. It provides features such as
a natural language processing (NLP) interface that is used for the following: to locate the most
relevant data; for semantic and statistical analysis of the data to ensure intuitive and relevant
visualizations; for prebuilt analytic functions — from forecasting algorithms to flters — that are
surfaced without any technical jargon and presented to the user in plain business language; for
automatic detection of important relationships in the data, through advanced analytics; and to
surface insights and encourage further exploration.
Use Watson Analytics for speci?c apps, not (yet) as a full enterprise BI platform. IBM
Watson Analytics is a growing and evolving product with continuous delivery of new capabilities
such as integration with IBM DataWorks and Cognos. However, at the time of this evaluation, it
had limitations, such as connectivity to only one data source at a time and no full-client software,
which limit Watson Analytics’ functionality in an offine mode. For large enterprise deployments,
complement Watson Analytics with the next release of IBM Cognos (not evaluated in this Wave
evaluation). IBM Cognos has been redesigned for Agile BI and uses built-in Watson-based
intelligence to help access and shape all types of data and author and share content over
an enterprise BI and analytics platform. It uses automated modeling and shares an intuitive
dashboarding experience with Watson Analytics.
› Birst offers cloud-based Agile and large enterprise grade BI with exclusive features. In
addition to crossing most of the t’s and dotting most of the i’s of self-service Agile BI and data
visualization, Birst offers a few truly unique features. First, Birst can automatically generate a
dimensional model reducing the need for expensive, highly trained data modelers. Next, Birst’s
underlying ROLAP — not unique in the enterprise BI landscape, but seldom seen in the Agile BI
platforms — has declarative capabilities that support metadata and data reuse versus building
siloed applications and includes large enterprise performance enhancing capabilities like multitiered
caching and aggregate awareness. Last but not least, unlike other cloud-based solutions, Birst
does not require all data to be moved to cloud. Instead, Birst can directly query data on premises
and combine it with analytic-ready data in the Birst cloud via query federation that supports a
combination of hybrid cloud plus on-premises deployment scenarios.
Buyers should ensure they have access to a pool of local Birst resources. Birst is still a
relatively small vendor so large global enterprise buyers should also perform due diligence on the
availability of local Birst resources in case they are looking to use Birst as a BI development PaaS.
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Supplemental Material
Online Resource
The online version of Figure 4 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 of three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each
solution:
› Vendor surveys. Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation
criteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where
necessary to gather details of vendor qualifcations.
› Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their product’s functionality. We
used fndings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.
› Customer reference surveys. To validate product and vendor qualifcations, Forrester also
surveyed a total of 29 of the vendors’ current customers.
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FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
September 25, 2015
© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
[email protected] or +1 866-367-7378
17
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
The Forrester Wave Methodology
We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated in this
market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our fnal list. We choose these vendors based
on: 1) product ft; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate vendors that have
limited customer references and products that don’t ft the scope of our evaluation.
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop
the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria,
we gather details of product qualifcations through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires,
demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review,
and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.
We set default weightings to refect our analysis of the needs of large user companies — and/or other
scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document — and then score the vendors based on a
clearly defned scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we encourage
readers to adapt the weightings to ft their individual needs through the Excel-based tool. The fnal
scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering, strategy, and market
presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product capabilities and vendor
strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every Forrester Wave follows, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester- wave-methodology.html.
Forrester’s Business Technographics
®
Global Data And Analytics Survey, 2014, was felded to 1,658
business and technology decision-makers located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France,
Germany, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the US from SMB and enterprise companies with 100
or more employees. This survey is part of Forrester’s Business Technographics and was felded
from January 2014 to March 2014. ResearchNow felded this survey on behalf of Forrester. Survey
respondent incentives include points redeemable for gift certifcates. We have provided exact sample
sizes in this report on a question-by question basis.
Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2015, was felded from
January through March 2015 of 3,005 business and technology decision-makers located in Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States from
companies with 100 or more employees.
Forrester’s Business Technographics provides demand-side insight into the priorities, investments, and
customer journeys of business and technology decision-makers and the workforce across the globe.
Forrester collects data insights from qualifed respondents in 10 countries spanning the Americas,
Europe, and Asia. Business Technographics uses only superior data sources and advanced data-
cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2015
September 25, 2015
© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.
[email protected] or +1 866-367-7378
18
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Integrity Policy
All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Waves, is conducted according to our Integrity Policy.
For more information, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.
Endnotes
1
These are estimates based on ranges and are not exact. Source: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Data
And Analytics Survey, 2015.
2
In Forrester’s 60-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we identifed the 11 most
signifcant software providers and researched, analyzed, and scored their current market offerings. This report details
our fndings about how well each vendor fulflls Forrester’s evaluation criteria and where they stand in relation to each
other to help application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right vendor for their enterprise BI
platform. See the “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q1 2015” Forrester report.
3
Forrester has created a pragmatic tool clients can use to categorize and shortlist the large BI market based on specifc
needs. See the “Forrester’s 10-Step Methodology For Shortlisting Business Intelligence Vendors” Forrester report.
4
Business intelligence (BI) must keep evolving, improving, and adapting to key business agility trends in the age of the
customer. Its next evolution? Systems of insight. This report connects the dots between our research on BI, Agile BI,
and big data; proposes best practices for merging previously separate efforts into a more cohesive system of insight
strategy; and offers actionable advice for AD&D pros working on BI and big data initiatives on supercharging BI and
upgrading to 21st-century systems of insight. See the “It’s Time To Upgrade Business Intelligence To Systems Of
Insight” Forrester report.
5
Referencehttp://www.tableau.com/about/press-releases/2015/tableau-awarded-hichertribcs-certifcation-
international-business
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