Description
The Forrester Wave Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise
Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
by Boris Evelson, December 18, 2013
For: Application
Development
& Delivery
Professionals
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Best-Of-Breed Versus Suite Is No Longer A Major BI Platform Selection
Criterion
Firms no longer have to make a choice between less expensive, ERP-embedded, but
ofen inferior BI tools and a best-of-breed BI platform from an independent vendor -- a
common conundrum in the past decade. In the modern world, BI platforms can be
embedded into a broader enterprise sofware suite and still be open and best of breed.
Factors Other Than BI Functionality Often Lead BI Platform Selection
Choices
As BI functionality becomes commoditized, buyers need to look for diferentiation
elsewhere in these platforms. It’s not just about tool functionality; tight integration with
enterprise ERP, ETL, portal, and desktop ofce applications can ofen break the tie when
selecting a strategic enterprise BI platform.
A Single Enterprise BI Platform May Be A Vision But Is Seldom A Practical
Reality
Having 10 diferent BI platforms may be overkill, but trying to standardize on a single
platform brings diminishing returns. Large organizations will likely settle on at least
three platforms: a broad, scalable enterprise suite; BI embedded in ERP, CRM, and
fnancial sofware packages; and lightweight desktop self-service tools for business users.
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
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FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
WHY READ THIS REPORT
In Forrester’s 72-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we
identifed the 11 most signifcant sofware providers — Actuate, IBM, Information Builders, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, Oracle, QlikTech, SAP, SAS, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware — in the category and
researched, analyzed, and scored them. Tis 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
professionals select the right partner for their enterprise BI platforms.
Table Of Contents
Industry Leaders Compete On Information
The BI Software Market Is Becoming More
Crowded Every Year
True Vendor Differentiation Lies In The Details
Enterprise BI Platform Evaluation Overview
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering,
Strategy, And Market Presence
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To
Support BI In Complex Organizations
BI Is A Buyers’ Market That Offers Plenty Of
Choices
Vendor Pro?les
Leaders
Strong Performers
Supplemental Material
Notes & Resources
Forrester conducted product evaluations in
September 2013, interviewed 10 vendors,
and surveyed 94 user companies.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
with Holger Kisker, Ph.D., Martha Bennett, and Nasry Angel
2
7
10
12
17
DECEMBER 18, 2013
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 2
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
INDUSTRY LEADERS COMPETE ON INFORMATION
Te majority of large organizations have either already shifed away from using BI as just another back-
ofce process and toward competing on BI-enabled information or are in the process of doing so.
Businesses can no longer compete just on the cost, margins, or quality of their products and services in
an increasingly commoditized global economy. Two kinds of companies will ultimately be more
successful, prosperous, and proftable: 1) those with richer, more accurate information about their
customers and products than their competitors and 2) those that have the same quality of information
as their competitors but get it sooner. Forrester’s Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence
And Big Data, Q4 2012 survey showed that enterprises that invest more in BI have higher growth.
The BI Software Market Is Becoming More Crowded Every Year
Te sofware industry recognized this trend decades ago, resulting in a market swarming with
startups that appeared and (very ofen) found success faster than large vendors could acquire them.
Te market is still jam-packed and includes multiple dynamics:
? All ERP and sofware stack vendors ofer leading BI platforms . . . Stack or suite versus
best of breed is no longer a consideration. All large sofware stack and enterprise resource
planning (ERP) vendors have either built or acquired market-leading BI platforms. Te pace
of acquisition has not slowed: In the past few years, Oracle has acquired Endeca, SAP acquired
KXEN, and IBM acquired i2, Te Now Factory, Star Analytics, and StoredIQ. Forrsights data
indicates that these three stack vendors, along with Microsof, are currently the most popular BI
choices for companies.
? . . . but there’s also plenty of room for independent BI vendors. If your sourcing and vendor
management policy calls for diversifcation and less dependence on a single vendor, rest easy —
you have abundant options. SAS and Information Builders deliver one-stop BI shopping and ofer
not just BI, but also most of the data management platforms and tools. Actuate and MicroStrategy
ofer reporting and analytics platforms that can scale to the needs of large enterprises. Panorama
Sofware, QlikTech, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware provide diferentiated, highly visual,
intuitive analytics oriented toward business users. Forrester clients are taking notice: Tableau and
QlikTech rank among the top fve vendors mentioned in the BI-related inquiries that we’ve felded
in the past 12 months (see Figure 1).
? Departmental desktop BI tools aimed at business users are scaling up. Panorama Sofware,
QlikTech, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware started out by ofering departmental desktop-
based technologies that appealed to business users due to their ease of use and lesser reliance
on enterprise IT support. While that appeal is still there, these vendors are now going afer
large enterprises with features that challenge larger vendors in terms of scalability, security,
rich metadata, internationalization, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other
industrial-strength enterprise features.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 3
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Enterprise BI platform vendors are going afer self-service use cases. Large enterprise BI
platform vendors aren’t sitting on their laurels; they’re prioritizing investments in self-service,
in-memory, desktop, and cloud products that appeal to business users. Because these tools are
part of larger, more complete enterprise BI platforms, vendors ofen give them away for free; for
example, you get IBM Cognos Insight if you have Cognos 10 enterprise licenses, SAP Lumira if
you buy the BusinessObjects BI suite, or the self-service BI features in Microsof Excel 2013 like
Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, and Power Query if you have Microsof Ofce 2013 or
SharePoint 2010. Tese vendors have an additional advantage: IT can migrate self-provisioned
BI applications to their more scalable platform. Tis puts a lot of pressure on the vendors in the
departmental category.
? Cloud ofers options to organizations that would rather not deal with BI stack complexity.
Got data, want information, but don’t want to deal with installation, confguration, integration,
tuning, optimization, maintenance, and support? Large vendors such as Actuate, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, SAP, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware and native cloud BI vendors like Birst,
Bime, and GoodData ofer very attractive choices for such use cases.
? Hadoop is breathing new life into open source BI. Open source BI tools have been around
for years, but big data and Hadoop are now re-energizing these products. If you have limited
budget, want to reduce your dependence on commercial sofware vendors, and want to
leverage the expertise of millions of sofware developers around the world, look to Actuate
BIRT, Jaspersof, Pentaho, and SpagoBI. Large BI systems integrators (SIs) are also responding
to clients’ demands to reduce their dependence on commercial code and vendors and have
recently started building open source BI solutions for clients — such as Luxof’s Horizon data
visualization platform.
? Self-service BI takes on a new meaning. Business users are no longer satisfed with just
discovering and analyzing data; they’re also asking for the ability to perform basic data
manipulation tasks like integration, matching, and deduplication without having to wait for
enterprise batch extract-transform-load (ETL) and data cleansing cycles. SAP built these
features into Lumira; Actuate acquired functionality from Quiterian that it now ofers as BIRT
Analytics; and Tableau Sofware and QlikTech partner with Paxata. Alteryx, Microsof (via the
BI features in Excel 2013), and Prognoz also support this use case out of the box.
? Te line between BI sofware and services is blurring. Leading consultants and SIs are riding
the BI wave, getting into BI outsourcing deals where they take on the burden of managing a
client’s data and providing information-as-a-service, ofen hiding architecture and sofware
complexities from the client.
1
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 4
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Te BI use cases and vendors cited above don’t even come close to comprising a complete list.
Other use cases include lightweight BI platforms that lend themselves to embedding into other
applications, prebuilt components that can be quickly assembled into use case-specifc BI apps, and
extracting data from exotic data sources such as mainframe reports. Other vendors in the space
include arcplan, Bitam, Board International, Datawatch, Dimensional Insight, InetSof Technology,
JackBe (Sofware AG), Jinfonet Sofware, Logi Analytics, Looker, Rocket Sofware, Salient
Management, SiSense, Targit, Treasure Data, and Yellowfn.
Figure 1 How Organizations Use And Inquire About Leading BI Vendors
Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 108103
*Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012
Base: 634 IT executives and technology decision-makers
(multiple responses accepted)
Rank in the
number of
BI inquiries
“Which vendors’ BI tools do you currently use?”*
SAP 1
Microsoft 2 (tie)
Tableau Software 2 (tie)
Oracle 4
QlikTech 5
IBM 6
MicroStrategy 7
SAS 8
Actuate 9
Information Builders
SAP
Microsoft
Tableau Software
Tibco Software
Oracle
QlikTech
IBM
MicroStrategy
SAS
Actuate
Information Builders
36%
55%
5%
4%
45%
6%
31%
9%
14%
4%
4%
10
Tibco Software 11
Base: BI-related inquiries by Forrester
clients over the past 12 months
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 5
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
True Vendor Differentiation Lies In The Details
Evaluating, categorizing, and ranking 30 or more BI vendors is a daunting task. As a result, in this
Forrester Wave we concentrated on evaluating core BI capabilities such as:
2
? Advanced data visualization. ADV supports a wide range of new, interactive graphical
data representations beyond traditional bar charts, pie charts, and scorecards. It difers from
static charts via capabilities such as the autosuggestion of the best chart type based on data
and metadata; visual querying; dynamically changing content; multiple dynamically linked
visualization panels; custom-built chart types; and personalization. When evaluating BI vendor
ADV capabilities, look for features like animations, geospatial integration, the ability to handle
multiple dimensions, exploration and data discovery, storyboarding, and visual querying.
3
? Analysis or OLAP. Otherwise known as “slicing and dicing” analysis, online analytical
processing (OLAP) tools allow a user to almost instantaneously regroup, reaggregate, and re-
sort facts — typically additive numbers like transaction amounts and account balances — by
any dimension (usually a descriptive element like time, region, organizational unit, or product
line). When evaluating BI vendor OLAP capabilities, look for features like limits on dimensions
and hierarchies; cube sizes; the ability to drill up, down, across, and through the data; and
autogeneration of time series data.
? Exploration and discovery. Tis is analysis with a twist. Analysis typically only provides answers
to questions that have been modeled and prebuilt in an underlying relational or multidimensional
data model. With data exploration, no data modeling is required; all entities and attributes are
instantly cross-referenced and correlated with each other. No relational or multidimensional
model is built; every attribute can be used as a fact or as a dimension; and a micromodel is built at
the time of querying. When evaluating BI vendor exploration and discovery capabilities, look for
features like the ability to reuse any element as a fact or dimension; the ability to search for any
value or text anywhere in the model; and faceted navigation.
4
? Dashboards. Dashboards are interactive visualizations that mash up diferent historical, current,
and/or predictive information into one efcient graphical user interface (GUI). Typically,
dashboards display key performance indicators (KPIs) and use visual cues to focus user
attention on important conditions, trends, and exceptions.
? Performance management. Strategy and performance management address goals, objectives,
and accountability. Performance analytics typically use a variety of KPIs that might include
strategic scorecards; relevant comparisons against plans, budgets, forecasts, prior performance,
and industry benchmark data; and the ability to drill down to root-cause details. When
evaluating BI vendor performance management capabilities, look for embedded functionality
and tight integration with other performance management platforms.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 6
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Predictive analytics. Predictive analytics represent any solution that supports the identifcation
of meaningful patterns and correlations among variables in complex, structured, unstructured,
historical, and potential future data sets for the purposes of predicting events and assessing
the attractiveness of various courses of action. When evaluating BI vendor predictive analytics
capabilities, look for aspects like how many routines come out of the box, how tightly they’re
integrated with the rest of the BI platform, and whether the vendor integrates open source R.
5
? Reporting and querying. Tis includes analytical reporting based on a data warehouse
(DW) or data mart and operational reporting based on an operational database management
system. Reporting tools ofen include pixel-perfect positioning of data and graphics, a scripting
language equal in power to a full programming language, and the ability to handle complex
headers, footers, nested subtotals, and multiple report bands on a single page. Ad hoc query
tools provide quick answers to business questions. When evaluating BI platform reporting
capabilities, look for features like report formatting (including conditional formatting), profle-
based customization, grouping, ranking, sorting, fltering, and expanding and collapsing reports.
We also looked at the information delivery capabilities of these tools, such as:
? Embedded BI. Embedded reporting, analytics, and dashboards are purpose-built analytics
capabilities that are embedded into other business applications, such as ERP, CRM, and supply
chain management (SCM), either natively, via a sofware development kit or API, or via service-
oriented architecture (SOA) or web services.
? Integration with Microsof Ofce applications. While all leading BI platforms integrate with
Microsof Word, PowerPoint (for documents and presentations that use “live” data), and Excel
(for viewing secure and trusted corporate data), very few provide tight integration with email
beyond emailing reports or report URLs. Organizations can embed BI dashboards into an email
application — for example, by creating another panel in Outlook similar to its existing mail,
calendar, and task panels. Further customizations make the data more actionable; for example,
an email from a certain customer could proactively expose a dashboard about that customer.
? Portal integration. Portals may serve as a single access point to catalog and index, classify,
and search for BI objects such as dashboards and reports. Most BI platforms come with their
own portals, but organizing multiple BI applications based on diferent platforms under one
portal umbrella requires legwork. Organizations can apply enterprise portal standards to all BI
applications and expose all BI metadata to the portal search engine to allow users to search for
all BI content from a single point.
? Tick and thin clients. Tese include native desktop and mobile device client applications,
applications accessible via any Internet browser, and rich Internet applications that use
standards like HTML5.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 7
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Other report and dashboard dissemination capabilities. Even though interactive desktop and
mobile BI applications are becoming more popular, many organizations still need to schedule
batch reports and deliver them automatically to multiple devices via email, electronic data
interchange, and other electronic formats.
And we didn’t forget to evaluate the integration of BI tools with foundational, supporting
components such as:
? Applications. Look for the number of “hooks” (APIs) into various programming languages that
you can use to customize or execute platform functions. Tis is key for embedded BI, white-
labeled BI applications, and the integration of BI with any other platforms.
? Data. Most BI platforms come with basic data integration (ETL) functionality. Beyond that,
look for certifed integration with leading data integration platforms.
6
? Contextual services. BI output is only as good as the source data. Look for certifed integration
with data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) platforms.
? Technical architecture. Last but not least, consider technical architecture features such as 64-
bit architectures, client and server platforms, application server support, SOA certifcation, and
features needed to scale up and out.
Te detailed list of BI platform capabilities and features is much, much longer. As part of the research
conducted for this Forrester Wave, Forrester collected more than 300 data points from each vendor
and consolidated them into 72 criteria. We used those criteria to evaluate, score, and rank the vendors.
ENTERPRISE BI PLATFORM EVALUATION OVERVIEW
To assess the state of the market for enterprise business intelligence platforms and see how the vendors
stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top BI vendors.
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence
Afer examining past research, user needs assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we
developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 72 criteria,
which we grouped into three high-level buckets:
? Current ofering. We assessed each vendor’s current ofering by considering all of the features
and capabilities reviewed above. We also evaluated a short demonstration by each vendor of its
key capabilities and surveyed a total of 94 of the vendors’ customers.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 8
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? 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 and each
vendor’s go-to-market pricing and licensing strategy.
? Market presence. To establish a product’s market presence, 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.
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To Support BI In Complex Organizations
Forrester included 11 vendors in the assessment: Actuate, IBM, Information Builders, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, Oracle, QlikTech, SAP, SAS, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware. Oracle was
included as a nonparticipating vendor. Each of these vendors has (see Figure 2):
? A complete, self-contained, fully functional BI platform development environment. We
focused on BI tools not technologically or functionally tied or limited to particular functional
or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. Tese tools must be complete, self-contained BI
environments or platforms that do not necessarily have to be embedded into other applications.
? Te ability to query databases using SQL and MDX. While other querying technologies, such
as XQuery and DMX, are available and NoSQL data architecture is on the rise for certain BI use
cases, SQL and MDX are the database query technologies most widely used in large enterprises.
? Sufcient market presence and interest from Forrester clients. We included the top 11
vendors by BI revenue that also had at least 100 in-production customers and were present in
more than one major geographical region. We also focused on vendors that Forrester clients
frequently mentioned or asked about in the context of BI (measured as more than 25 inquiries
over the past 12 months).
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 9
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Figure 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Vendor
Actuate
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
QlikTech
SAP
SAS
Tableau Software
Tibco Software
Product
BIRT iHub
BIRT Analytics
Cognos BI
Cognos Insight
WebFocus
SQL Server
SharePoint
Excel
Offce
MicroStrategy Analytics Platform
Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition
QlikView
BusinessObjects BI Suite
Lumira
Enterprise BI Server
Visual Analytics
Offce Analytics
Desktop
Server
Public
Spotfre Platform
Spotfre Cloud
Spotfre Event Analytics
Version
3
10.2.1
8.0
2012
2013
2013
365
9.4
11
11
4.1
4.4
6.2
5.1
8.1
6.0
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 10
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Figure 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria (Cont.)
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Vendor selection criteria
At least three of the four major functional BI components that Forrester believes are critical for large
enterprise BI environments: production and operational reporting, ad hoc querying, OLAP, and
dashboards.
The ability to query databases using SQL and MDX. While other querying technologies such as
XQuery and DMX are available, SQL and MDX are used most widely in large enterprises.
A complete, self-contained, fully functioning BI environment that is not technologically or functionally
tied or limited to particular functional or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. To be considered, a
tool must be a complete, self-contained BI environment or platform that does not have to be
embedded in other applications.
Signifcant market presence: at least 100 in-production customers present in more than one major
geographical region and more than 10% of which are enterprise-grade installations that cross lines of
business and have more than 100 users.
Frequent interest from Forrester clients in the form of questions about or mentions of a vendor in the
context of inquiries about BI.
One of the top 11 vendors by BI revenues.
All products needed to be generally available by December 2013.
BI IS A BUYERS’ MARKET THAT OFFERS PLENTY OF CHOICES
Te evaluation uncovered a continuously evolving market in which (see Figure 3):
? SAP, IBM, SAS, Microsof, Oracle, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate lead
the pack. While many BI platform features are becoming commoditized, it’s not the individual
capabilities that diferentiate the Leaders, but rather the completeness, comprehensiveness, and
integration of the entire BI architectural stack. In addition to increasingly popular features
like analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, the Leaders also provide
the pixel-perfect, industrial-strength report writers that companies still need.
7
While many of
the Leaders appear to be closely grouped, each of them diferentiates itself in terms of specifc
individual capabilities, such as high scalability and tight integration with ETL, MDM, business
performance solutions, portals, and other highly relevant data management and information
delivery components. If one of our Leaders is already your enterprise’s preferred BI platform
provider, there may be little or no reason to look elsewhere for another specialized BI tool.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 11
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Tibco Sofware, QlikTech, and Tableau Sofware ofer highly competitive and diferentiated
options. Vendors in the Leaders category can by no means rest easy: the Strong Performers are
hot on their heels, especially where the main use case calls for business user self-service and
highly visual and intuitive analytics. In many specialized situations, these vendors can even
outshine and outperform the Leaders. Tibco Spotfre leads the market in highly visual streaming
analytics and business activity monitoring, tightly integrating it with process workfows, rules,
and advanced analytics to help enable the modern real-time enterprise. QlikView is hard to beat
in intuitive and spontaneous data exploration and discovery, providing a unique solution to the
age-old BI challenge “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Tableau Sofware’s diferentiation
goes well beyond technology: Its platform embeds most of the best practices that address the
human psychology of visual perception to produce the most intuitive visualizations.
Tis evaluation of the enterprise BI platform market is intended to be a starting point only. We
encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to ft their
individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.
Figure 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 ’13
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Go online to download
the Forrester Wave tool
for more detailed
product evaluations,
feature comparisons,
and customizable
rankings.
Risky
Bets Contenders Leaders
Strong
Performers
Strategy Weak Strong
Current
offering
Weak
Strong
Market presence
Full vendor participation
Incomplete vendor participation
Microsoft
SAP
Tableau Software
QlikTech
Tibco Software
Micro-
Strategy
Oracle
Actuate
Information Builders
SAS
IBM
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 12
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Figure 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 ’13 (Cont.)
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
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u
S
o
f
t
w
a
r
e
T
i
b
c
o
S
o
f
t
w
a
r
e
3.16
3.30
2.20
3.27
3.20
3.00
2.60
3.50
3.00
4.50
2.81
2.60
3.60
1.00
1.00
3.63
3.63
3.00
3.78
3.40
2.71
2.30
3.60
2.00
4.40
2.69
1.40
4.40
1.00
1.00
All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
VENDOR PROFILES
Leaders
? SAP leads the market with broad BI innovations. Whether it’s SAP HANA for low latency, agile,
and in-memory analytics; Lumira for business user self-service; or Crystal for scalable, mission-
critical reports, SAP’s philosophy and strategy of “the best tool for each job” delivers on its
promise. Firms engage with SAP on BI to beneft from one-stop shopping for data management
(ETL, MDM, DW, and DQ), BI products including the HANA appliance, and SAP’s expertise
with business domain and industry vertical applications based on its ERP experience. Forrester
found that SAP BusinessObjects had excellent capabilities in analytics, BI customization via a
rich set of APIs, data integration, information delivery, MDM, performance management,
reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical architecture. SAP customers particularly
praised BusinessObjects’ data integration, information delivery technical architecture, analytics,
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operational capabilities, and SAP’s corporate and product vision. SAP is the vendor that Forrester
clients ask about most ofen in BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 36% of companies
use SAP for BI. One concern that we ofen hear about BusinessObjects is that innovation and
functional richness sometimes trump product-to-product integration; customers still are faced
with multiple UIs and cannot reuse some objects across products.
? IBM dwarfs its competitors in the breadth and completeness of BI capabilities. If you
want a single source to meet all your BI needs, and if those needs include sofware, hardware
(including mainframes), and professional services, no vendor can fully compete with IBM.
Clients know that they can rely on IBM Cognos because, unlike some of its competitors, IBM
puts a high priority on integration and stability, even at the expense of sometimes being late
to the market with certain capabilities, such as cloud BI sofware-as-a-service. Forrester found
that IBM Cognos had excellent capabilities in analytics, data integration, information delivery,
MDM, performance management, reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical
architecture. IBM customers particularly praised Cognos’ analytics, performance management,
operational capabilities, reporting and querying, and technical architecture and IBM’s corporate
and product vision. IBM accounts for the sixth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent
survey data indicates that 31% of companies use Cognos for BI.
? SAS isn’t just about analytics — it also provides an enterprise-grade BI platform. Although
frms have known SAS as a leader in advanced and predictive analytics for years, don’t overlook
the fact that it also has a formidable BI platform. Firms engage with SAS on BI to beneft from
one-stop shopping for data management (ETL, MDM, and DQ), BI products including SAS
analytics appliances, expertise with business domain and industry vertical applications, and data
management professional services. Using SAS BI can also help clients reduce their dependence
on a single sofware vendor. Forrester found that SAS BI had excellent capabilities in data
integration, supported query languages, scalability, internationalization, BI customization with
a rich set of APIs, analytics, MDM, performance management, and reporting and querying. SAS
customers particularly praised its data integration, information delivery, technical architecture,
analytics, operational capabilities, and corporate and product vision. SAS accounts for the
eighth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 14% of
companies use SAS for BI. Concerns about SAS BI include a lack of pricing transparency and a
failure to ofer perpetual licenses.
? Microsof delivers a leading BI platform with a familiar Excel interface. Even if you’ve
standardized on other BI tools, you probably use, or at least have, Microsof BI components like
SQL Server, SharePoint, and Excel — so Microsof BI should be on your shortlist. Microsof’s
BI stack provides all of the necessary capabilities to support managed BI self-service. Business
users create BI content in their own sandboxes — via the BI features in Excel 2013 and the
cloud-based Power BI, which Microsof recently released into public preview — and collaborate
and share BI content via SharePoint. Tis allows IT to productionalize what users create and
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share; for example, a Power Pivot model saved to SharePoint becomes an Analysis Services
cube that IT can productionalize with robust ETL and an enterprise-grade UI. Forrester found
that Microsof BI had excellent capabilities in query languages, availability of BI appliances,
internationalization, customization via a rich set of APIs, MDM, and reporting and querying.
Microsof customers particularly praised the vendor’s data integration capabilities. Microsof
tied for the second-highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
55% of companies use Microsof for BI. Concerns include the Microsof centricity of the BI
platform — it requires SQL Server, SharePoint, and Ofce) — and its heavy reliance on partners
for implementation and systems integration services.
? Oracle supports the only plug-and-play BI for complex ERP environments. Te latest versions
of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Oracle BI Applications, as well as the Fusion
versions of Oracle ERP, have one thing in common: a single metadata layer called the common
enterprise information model (CEIM). In an all-Oracle environment, merely installing the three
platforms delivers instant operational and analytical BI, with reporting directly out of ERP. CEIM
also facilitates “actionable BI,” whereby frms can take actions such as updating the transactional
applications (ERP, CRM) with little to no coding. Te recent acquisition of Endeca gives Oracle
BI additional capabilities to analyze and explore (using faceted navigation) hierarchical data that
doesn’t ft into traditional relational or multidimensional structures, such as product data with
complex, ragged, uneven, or unbalanced hierarchies. Oracle packages OBIEE, Endeca, Essbase,
and the TimesTen database with the Exalytics appliance; customers have a choice of relational,
multidimensional, hierarchical, and in-memory databases — covering most BI use cases. Oracle
accounts for the fourth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
45% of companies use Oracle for BI. Concerns include a lack of desktop self-service BI tools and
the paucity of citable clients using OBIEE in heterogeneous non-Oracle environments.
? Information Builders can step in at any time with a platform to support all BI needs. If you
want to reduce your dependence on ERP and sofware stack vendors; need an integrated BI
platform that includes ETL, DQ, and MDM; have exotic data sources, including mainframe;
and really need a BI platform that can scale, Information Builders WebFocus is a top choice.
Forrester found that WebFocus had excellent data integration, information delivery, overall
technical architecture, scalability, analytics, MDM, performance management, reporting and
querying, and operational capabilities. WebFocus customers particularly praised its data access,
technical architecture, analytics, performance management, reporting and querying, and
operational capabilities and the vendor’s corporate and product vision. Information Builders
accounts for the 10th highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
4% of companies use it for BI. Concerns include lack of desktop based self-service BI tools and
the fact that WebFocus is based on Information Builders’ 4GL Focus programming language.
While Focus has a 30-year, battle-tested history of handling very large data sets, some clients
are concerned that they will need to supplement the WebFocus GUI with good old-fashioned
coding in Focus for especially complex programming tasks.
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? MicroStrategy shines with seamless architecture and a top mobile BI platform. MicroStrategy
has grown organically and architected its entire suite as a single platform. Forrester clients fnd
that, afer making the initial investment and efort in MicroStrategy, the reusability of all objects
and the relational OLAP engine with drill-anywhere capability ofen result in a lower long-term
total cost of ownership. We’ve also seen clients having the most success with enterprise-scalable
mobile BI applications delivered on the MicroStrategy platform. Forrester found that
MicroStrategy had excellent mobile information delivery, scalability, integrated metadata, and
reporting and querying functionality. MicroStrategy customers particularly praised the vendor’s
data access, information delivery, reporting and querying, operational capabilities, and corporate
and product vision. MicroStrategy accounts for the seventh highest number of Forrester BI
inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 9% of companies use it for BI. Concerns include its
high reliance on a largely disappearing network of partners, many of which have been acquired,
for architectural components like ETL, DQ, and MDM.
? Actuate is a top choice for scaling to millions of reports and users. Massive scalability —
interactive reporting applications producing output consumed by millions, not just thousands,
of users — is Actuate’s sweet spot. Its top use cases involve distributing complex, interactive
online statements to customers of large fnancial services institutions. Te Eclipse Foundation’s
BIRT, the basis of Actuate’s platform, is used by more than 3 million developers and is open
source — so it lends itself nicely to embedded BI and try-before-you-buy use cases. In 2013,
Actuate closed one of the gaps in its portfolio, business user self-service analytics, by acquiring
Quiterian. Forrester found that Actuate had excellent data access, information delivery,
scalability, integrated development environment (IDE), BI knowledge management, and
reporting and querying capabilities. Actuate accounts for the ninth highest number of Forrester
BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% of companies use Actuate for BI. Concerns
include its high reliance on a largely disappearing network of partners, many of which have
been acquired, for architectural components like ETL, DQ, and MDM.
Strong Performers
? Tibco Sofware excels in intuitive and interactive data visualizations and advanced analytics.
Tibco Spotfre is the space shuttle of in-memory analytics and advanced data visualization,
embedding more predictive analytical routines than its closest competitors. Spotfre also tightly
integrates with Tibco’s data, process, rule, and event management sofware — including the
recently acquired StreamBase — for real-time analytics, which includes advanced complex event
processing and business activity monitoring capabilities. Although Spotfre’s roots are in
deployments targeting power analysts and data scientists, today many organizations implement it
for all types of knowledge workers, from casual users to mobile executives. Forrester found that
Tibco Spotfre had excellent integration with process workfow and rules engines, cloud oferings,
analytics, data visualization, and MDM capabilities. Tibco accounts for the 11th highest number
of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% of companies use Spotfre for BI.
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Spotfre supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,
and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy
Spotfre in addition to, not instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
? QlikTech still shines with its unique, diferentiated in-memory 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. QlikView breaks through such barriers with associative
data architecture that exposes any-to-any relationships between entities and attributes. Business
users can explore these relationships, and uncover previously unknown information, just by
typing in a few keywords. Forrester found that QlikView had excellent capabilities in IDE
and collaborative BI. QlikTech customers particularly praised QlikView’s data access, data
integration, overall technical architecture, and analytics and QlikTech’s corporate and product
vision. QlikTech accounts for the ffh highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey
data indicates that 6% of companies use QlikView for BI. QlikView supports most enterprise
BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, but does
not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy QlikView in addition to, not
instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
? Tableau Sofware is moving to disrupt the BI market with highly intuitive data visualization.
Building efective data visualization requires much more than just technology. Very few business
analysts have a background in data visualization best practices to answer questions like: Is a data
set best visualized using a scatter plot or a bar graph? How many diferent colors should a single
graph use? Can we put two graphs with diferent scales next to each other on a single dashboard?
Tableau can answer these and many other questions about best practices based on the psychology
of human visual perception. Its GUI and library of white papers clearly shows that this is
Tableau’s specialty. Forrester found that Tableau had excellent data visualization and Hadoop
integration capabilities. Tableau customers particularly praised the data access, information
delivery, overall technical architecture, metadata architecture, self-service BI, and operational
capabilities and the vendor’s corporate and product vision. Tableau tied for the second-highest
number of Forrester BI inquiries — a real feat for a vendor that wasn’t even on our radar screen
until just a few years ago. Recent survey data indicates that 5% of companies use Tableau for BI.
Tableau supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,
and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy
Tableau in addition to, not instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
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SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Online Resource
Te online version of Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings.
Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave
Forrester used a combination 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
conducted surveys with 94 of the vendors’ current customers.
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.
Afer 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 oferings 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. Tese 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. Te fnal scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current ofering,
strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 18
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every
Forrester Wave evaluation follows, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-
wave-methodology.html.
Integrity Policy
All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, is conducted according to our
integrity policy. For more information, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-
policy.html.
Forrsights For Business Technology
Forrester’s Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012 was felded
to 634 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the
UK, and the US from small and medium-size business (SMB) and enterprise companies with 100
or more employees. All respondents reported working for companies that were currently using or
planning to use business intelligence (BI) technologies. Tis survey is part of Forrester’s Forrsights
for Business Technology and was felded during October 2012 and November 2012. Survey
respondent incentives included gif certifcates and research reports.
Each calendar year, Forrester’s Forrsights for Business Technology felds business-to-business
technology studies in more than 17 countries spanning North America, Latin America, Europe,
and developed and emerging Asia. For quality control, we carefully screen respondents according
to job title and function. Forrester’s Forrsights for Business Technology ensures that the fnal
survey population contains only those with signifcant involvement in the planning, funding, and
purchasing of IT products and services. Additionally, we set quotas for company size (number
of employees) and industry as a means of controlling the data distribution. Forrsights uses only
superior data sources and advanced data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.
ENDNOTES
1
Self-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-friendly or intuitive interfaces. To learn how to maximize
your return on BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Self-Service Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2012” report.
2
Continued economic uncertainty and major industry-changing dynamics like mobility and the shif to
digital business put a premium on data and information to facilitate strategic decision-making. Meanwhile,
the potential to mine and analyze vast quantities of data is transforming activities across the value chain.
Whether it’s optimizing the customer experience via social media or improving logistics by embedding
sensors in vehicles, data analysis is simply critical. To learn what capabilities are available and which will
best suit your organization’s needs, see the July 11, 2013, “TechRadar™: BI Analytics, Q3 2013” report.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 19
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
3
Enterprises fnd ADV platforms to be essential tools that enable them to monitor business, fnd patterns,
and take action to avoid threats and snatch opportunities. See the July 17, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™:
Advanced Data Visualization (ADV) Platforms, Q3 2012” report.
4
Self-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-friendly or intuitive interfaces. To maximize your return on
BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2
2012” report.
5
Predictive analytics enables frms to reduce risks, make intelligent decisions, and create diferentiated,
more personal customer experiences. But predictive analytics is hard to do without the right tools and
technologies, given the increasing challenge of storing, processing, and accessing the volume, velocity,
and variety of big data. In order to navigate the complex technology landscape, which will lead your
organization into the future of data advantage, see the January 3, 2013, “The Forrester Wave™: Big Data
Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q1 2013” report.
6
For more on ETL, refer to Forrester’s 60-criteria evaluation of enterprise ETL vendors. See the February 27,
2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise ETL, Q1 2012” report.
7
Reporting is still No. 1 on users’ priority lists for adoption, with 81% implementations in frms’ business
units. Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012.
Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to
global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 13 key roles at major companies providing proprietary
research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making
IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 108103
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doc_952626541.pdf
The Forrester Wave Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
Tel: +1 617.613.6000 | Fax: +1 617.613.5000 | www.forrester.com
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise
Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
by Boris Evelson, December 18, 2013
For: Application
Development
& Delivery
Professionals
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Best-Of-Breed Versus Suite Is No Longer A Major BI Platform Selection
Criterion
Firms no longer have to make a choice between less expensive, ERP-embedded, but
ofen inferior BI tools and a best-of-breed BI platform from an independent vendor -- a
common conundrum in the past decade. In the modern world, BI platforms can be
embedded into a broader enterprise sofware suite and still be open and best of breed.
Factors Other Than BI Functionality Often Lead BI Platform Selection
Choices
As BI functionality becomes commoditized, buyers need to look for diferentiation
elsewhere in these platforms. It’s not just about tool functionality; tight integration with
enterprise ERP, ETL, portal, and desktop ofce applications can ofen break the tie when
selecting a strategic enterprise BI platform.
A Single Enterprise BI Platform May Be A Vision But Is Seldom A Practical
Reality
Having 10 diferent BI platforms may be overkill, but trying to standardize on a single
platform brings diminishing returns. Large organizations will likely settle on at least
three platforms: a broad, scalable enterprise suite; BI embedded in ERP, CRM, and
fnancial sofware packages; and lightweight desktop self-service tools for business users.
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. 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. To
purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
WHY READ THIS REPORT
In Forrester’s 72-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we
identifed the 11 most signifcant sofware providers — Actuate, IBM, Information Builders, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, Oracle, QlikTech, SAP, SAS, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware — in the category and
researched, analyzed, and scored them. Tis 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
professionals select the right partner for their enterprise BI platforms.
Table Of Contents
Industry Leaders Compete On Information
The BI Software Market Is Becoming More
Crowded Every Year
True Vendor Differentiation Lies In The Details
Enterprise BI Platform Evaluation Overview
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering,
Strategy, And Market Presence
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To
Support BI In Complex Organizations
BI Is A Buyers’ Market That Offers Plenty Of
Choices
Vendor Pro?les
Leaders
Strong Performers
Supplemental Material
Notes & Resources
Forrester conducted product evaluations in
September 2013, interviewed 10 vendors,
and surveyed 94 user companies.
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The Forrester Wave™: Advanced Data
Visualization (ADV) Platforms, Q3 2012
July 17, 2012
The Forrester Wave™: Self-Service Business
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June 12, 2012
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013
The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Boris Evelson
with Holger Kisker, Ph.D., Martha Bennett, and Nasry Angel
2
7
10
12
17
DECEMBER 18, 2013
FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
INDUSTRY LEADERS COMPETE ON INFORMATION
Te majority of large organizations have either already shifed away from using BI as just another back-
ofce process and toward competing on BI-enabled information or are in the process of doing so.
Businesses can no longer compete just on the cost, margins, or quality of their products and services in
an increasingly commoditized global economy. Two kinds of companies will ultimately be more
successful, prosperous, and proftable: 1) those with richer, more accurate information about their
customers and products than their competitors and 2) those that have the same quality of information
as their competitors but get it sooner. Forrester’s Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence
And Big Data, Q4 2012 survey showed that enterprises that invest more in BI have higher growth.
The BI Software Market Is Becoming More Crowded Every Year
Te sofware industry recognized this trend decades ago, resulting in a market swarming with
startups that appeared and (very ofen) found success faster than large vendors could acquire them.
Te market is still jam-packed and includes multiple dynamics:
? All ERP and sofware stack vendors ofer leading BI platforms . . . Stack or suite versus
best of breed is no longer a consideration. All large sofware stack and enterprise resource
planning (ERP) vendors have either built or acquired market-leading BI platforms. Te pace
of acquisition has not slowed: In the past few years, Oracle has acquired Endeca, SAP acquired
KXEN, and IBM acquired i2, Te Now Factory, Star Analytics, and StoredIQ. Forrsights data
indicates that these three stack vendors, along with Microsof, are currently the most popular BI
choices for companies.
? . . . but there’s also plenty of room for independent BI vendors. If your sourcing and vendor
management policy calls for diversifcation and less dependence on a single vendor, rest easy —
you have abundant options. SAS and Information Builders deliver one-stop BI shopping and ofer
not just BI, but also most of the data management platforms and tools. Actuate and MicroStrategy
ofer reporting and analytics platforms that can scale to the needs of large enterprises. Panorama
Sofware, QlikTech, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware provide diferentiated, highly visual,
intuitive analytics oriented toward business users. Forrester clients are taking notice: Tableau and
QlikTech rank among the top fve vendors mentioned in the BI-related inquiries that we’ve felded
in the past 12 months (see Figure 1).
? Departmental desktop BI tools aimed at business users are scaling up. Panorama Sofware,
QlikTech, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware started out by ofering departmental desktop-
based technologies that appealed to business users due to their ease of use and lesser reliance
on enterprise IT support. While that appeal is still there, these vendors are now going afer
large enterprises with features that challenge larger vendors in terms of scalability, security,
rich metadata, internationalization, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other
industrial-strength enterprise features.
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 3
© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Enterprise BI platform vendors are going afer self-service use cases. Large enterprise BI
platform vendors aren’t sitting on their laurels; they’re prioritizing investments in self-service,
in-memory, desktop, and cloud products that appeal to business users. Because these tools are
part of larger, more complete enterprise BI platforms, vendors ofen give them away for free; for
example, you get IBM Cognos Insight if you have Cognos 10 enterprise licenses, SAP Lumira if
you buy the BusinessObjects BI suite, or the self-service BI features in Microsof Excel 2013 like
Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, and Power Query if you have Microsof Ofce 2013 or
SharePoint 2010. Tese vendors have an additional advantage: IT can migrate self-provisioned
BI applications to their more scalable platform. Tis puts a lot of pressure on the vendors in the
departmental category.
? Cloud ofers options to organizations that would rather not deal with BI stack complexity.
Got data, want information, but don’t want to deal with installation, confguration, integration,
tuning, optimization, maintenance, and support? Large vendors such as Actuate, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, SAP, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware and native cloud BI vendors like Birst,
Bime, and GoodData ofer very attractive choices for such use cases.
? Hadoop is breathing new life into open source BI. Open source BI tools have been around
for years, but big data and Hadoop are now re-energizing these products. If you have limited
budget, want to reduce your dependence on commercial sofware vendors, and want to
leverage the expertise of millions of sofware developers around the world, look to Actuate
BIRT, Jaspersof, Pentaho, and SpagoBI. Large BI systems integrators (SIs) are also responding
to clients’ demands to reduce their dependence on commercial code and vendors and have
recently started building open source BI solutions for clients — such as Luxof’s Horizon data
visualization platform.
? Self-service BI takes on a new meaning. Business users are no longer satisfed with just
discovering and analyzing data; they’re also asking for the ability to perform basic data
manipulation tasks like integration, matching, and deduplication without having to wait for
enterprise batch extract-transform-load (ETL) and data cleansing cycles. SAP built these
features into Lumira; Actuate acquired functionality from Quiterian that it now ofers as BIRT
Analytics; and Tableau Sofware and QlikTech partner with Paxata. Alteryx, Microsof (via the
BI features in Excel 2013), and Prognoz also support this use case out of the box.
? Te line between BI sofware and services is blurring. Leading consultants and SIs are riding
the BI wave, getting into BI outsourcing deals where they take on the burden of managing a
client’s data and providing information-as-a-service, ofen hiding architecture and sofware
complexities from the client.
1
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Te BI use cases and vendors cited above don’t even come close to comprising a complete list.
Other use cases include lightweight BI platforms that lend themselves to embedding into other
applications, prebuilt components that can be quickly assembled into use case-specifc BI apps, and
extracting data from exotic data sources such as mainframe reports. Other vendors in the space
include arcplan, Bitam, Board International, Datawatch, Dimensional Insight, InetSof Technology,
JackBe (Sofware AG), Jinfonet Sofware, Logi Analytics, Looker, Rocket Sofware, Salient
Management, SiSense, Targit, Treasure Data, and Yellowfn.
Figure 1 How Organizations Use And Inquire About Leading BI Vendors
Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 108103
*Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012
Base: 634 IT executives and technology decision-makers
(multiple responses accepted)
Rank in the
number of
BI inquiries
“Which vendors’ BI tools do you currently use?”*
SAP 1
Microsoft 2 (tie)
Tableau Software 2 (tie)
Oracle 4
QlikTech 5
IBM 6
MicroStrategy 7
SAS 8
Actuate 9
Information Builders
SAP
Microsoft
Tableau Software
Tibco Software
Oracle
QlikTech
IBM
MicroStrategy
SAS
Actuate
Information Builders
36%
55%
5%
4%
45%
6%
31%
9%
14%
4%
4%
10
Tibco Software 11
Base: BI-related inquiries by Forrester
clients over the past 12 months
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
True Vendor Differentiation Lies In The Details
Evaluating, categorizing, and ranking 30 or more BI vendors is a daunting task. As a result, in this
Forrester Wave we concentrated on evaluating core BI capabilities such as:
2
? Advanced data visualization. ADV supports a wide range of new, interactive graphical
data representations beyond traditional bar charts, pie charts, and scorecards. It difers from
static charts via capabilities such as the autosuggestion of the best chart type based on data
and metadata; visual querying; dynamically changing content; multiple dynamically linked
visualization panels; custom-built chart types; and personalization. When evaluating BI vendor
ADV capabilities, look for features like animations, geospatial integration, the ability to handle
multiple dimensions, exploration and data discovery, storyboarding, and visual querying.
3
? Analysis or OLAP. Otherwise known as “slicing and dicing” analysis, online analytical
processing (OLAP) tools allow a user to almost instantaneously regroup, reaggregate, and re-
sort facts — typically additive numbers like transaction amounts and account balances — by
any dimension (usually a descriptive element like time, region, organizational unit, or product
line). When evaluating BI vendor OLAP capabilities, look for features like limits on dimensions
and hierarchies; cube sizes; the ability to drill up, down, across, and through the data; and
autogeneration of time series data.
? Exploration and discovery. Tis is analysis with a twist. Analysis typically only provides answers
to questions that have been modeled and prebuilt in an underlying relational or multidimensional
data model. With data exploration, no data modeling is required; all entities and attributes are
instantly cross-referenced and correlated with each other. No relational or multidimensional
model is built; every attribute can be used as a fact or as a dimension; and a micromodel is built at
the time of querying. When evaluating BI vendor exploration and discovery capabilities, look for
features like the ability to reuse any element as a fact or dimension; the ability to search for any
value or text anywhere in the model; and faceted navigation.
4
? Dashboards. Dashboards are interactive visualizations that mash up diferent historical, current,
and/or predictive information into one efcient graphical user interface (GUI). Typically,
dashboards display key performance indicators (KPIs) and use visual cues to focus user
attention on important conditions, trends, and exceptions.
? Performance management. Strategy and performance management address goals, objectives,
and accountability. Performance analytics typically use a variety of KPIs that might include
strategic scorecards; relevant comparisons against plans, budgets, forecasts, prior performance,
and industry benchmark data; and the ability to drill down to root-cause details. When
evaluating BI vendor performance management capabilities, look for embedded functionality
and tight integration with other performance management platforms.
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? Predictive analytics. Predictive analytics represent any solution that supports the identifcation
of meaningful patterns and correlations among variables in complex, structured, unstructured,
historical, and potential future data sets for the purposes of predicting events and assessing
the attractiveness of various courses of action. When evaluating BI vendor predictive analytics
capabilities, look for aspects like how many routines come out of the box, how tightly they’re
integrated with the rest of the BI platform, and whether the vendor integrates open source R.
5
? Reporting and querying. Tis includes analytical reporting based on a data warehouse
(DW) or data mart and operational reporting based on an operational database management
system. Reporting tools ofen include pixel-perfect positioning of data and graphics, a scripting
language equal in power to a full programming language, and the ability to handle complex
headers, footers, nested subtotals, and multiple report bands on a single page. Ad hoc query
tools provide quick answers to business questions. When evaluating BI platform reporting
capabilities, look for features like report formatting (including conditional formatting), profle-
based customization, grouping, ranking, sorting, fltering, and expanding and collapsing reports.
We also looked at the information delivery capabilities of these tools, such as:
? Embedded BI. Embedded reporting, analytics, and dashboards are purpose-built analytics
capabilities that are embedded into other business applications, such as ERP, CRM, and supply
chain management (SCM), either natively, via a sofware development kit or API, or via service-
oriented architecture (SOA) or web services.
? Integration with Microsof Ofce applications. While all leading BI platforms integrate with
Microsof Word, PowerPoint (for documents and presentations that use “live” data), and Excel
(for viewing secure and trusted corporate data), very few provide tight integration with email
beyond emailing reports or report URLs. Organizations can embed BI dashboards into an email
application — for example, by creating another panel in Outlook similar to its existing mail,
calendar, and task panels. Further customizations make the data more actionable; for example,
an email from a certain customer could proactively expose a dashboard about that customer.
? Portal integration. Portals may serve as a single access point to catalog and index, classify,
and search for BI objects such as dashboards and reports. Most BI platforms come with their
own portals, but organizing multiple BI applications based on diferent platforms under one
portal umbrella requires legwork. Organizations can apply enterprise portal standards to all BI
applications and expose all BI metadata to the portal search engine to allow users to search for
all BI content from a single point.
? Tick and thin clients. Tese include native desktop and mobile device client applications,
applications accessible via any Internet browser, and rich Internet applications that use
standards like HTML5.
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? Other report and dashboard dissemination capabilities. Even though interactive desktop and
mobile BI applications are becoming more popular, many organizations still need to schedule
batch reports and deliver them automatically to multiple devices via email, electronic data
interchange, and other electronic formats.
And we didn’t forget to evaluate the integration of BI tools with foundational, supporting
components such as:
? Applications. Look for the number of “hooks” (APIs) into various programming languages that
you can use to customize or execute platform functions. Tis is key for embedded BI, white-
labeled BI applications, and the integration of BI with any other platforms.
? Data. Most BI platforms come with basic data integration (ETL) functionality. Beyond that,
look for certifed integration with leading data integration platforms.
6
? Contextual services. BI output is only as good as the source data. Look for certifed integration
with data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) platforms.
? Technical architecture. Last but not least, consider technical architecture features such as 64-
bit architectures, client and server platforms, application server support, SOA certifcation, and
features needed to scale up and out.
Te detailed list of BI platform capabilities and features is much, much longer. As part of the research
conducted for this Forrester Wave, Forrester collected more than 300 data points from each vendor
and consolidated them into 72 criteria. We used those criteria to evaluate, score, and rank the vendors.
ENTERPRISE BI PLATFORM EVALUATION OVERVIEW
To assess the state of the market for enterprise business intelligence platforms and see how the vendors
stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top BI vendors.
Evaluation Criteria: Current Product Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence
Afer examining past research, user needs assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we
developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 72 criteria,
which we grouped into three high-level buckets:
? Current ofering. We assessed each vendor’s current ofering by considering all of the features
and capabilities reviewed above. We also evaluated a short demonstration by each vendor of its
key capabilities and surveyed a total of 94 of the vendors’ customers.
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? 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 and each
vendor’s go-to-market pricing and licensing strategy.
? Market presence. To establish a product’s market presence, 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.
Evaluated Vendors Have What It Takes To Support BI In Complex Organizations
Forrester included 11 vendors in the assessment: Actuate, IBM, Information Builders, Microsof,
MicroStrategy, Oracle, QlikTech, SAP, SAS, Tableau Sofware, and Tibco Sofware. Oracle was
included as a nonparticipating vendor. Each of these vendors has (see Figure 2):
? A complete, self-contained, fully functional BI platform development environment. We
focused on BI tools not technologically or functionally tied or limited to particular functional
or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. Tese tools must be complete, self-contained BI
environments or platforms that do not necessarily have to be embedded into other applications.
? Te ability to query databases using SQL and MDX. While other querying technologies, such
as XQuery and DMX, are available and NoSQL data architecture is on the rise for certain BI use
cases, SQL and MDX are the database query technologies most widely used in large enterprises.
? Sufcient market presence and interest from Forrester clients. We included the top 11
vendors by BI revenue that also had at least 100 in-production customers and were present in
more than one major geographical region. We also focused on vendors that Forrester clients
frequently mentioned or asked about in the context of BI (measured as more than 25 inquiries
over the past 12 months).
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Figure 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Vendor
Actuate
IBM
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
QlikTech
SAP
SAS
Tableau Software
Tibco Software
Product
BIRT iHub
BIRT Analytics
Cognos BI
Cognos Insight
WebFocus
SQL Server
SharePoint
Excel
Offce
MicroStrategy Analytics Platform
Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition
QlikView
BusinessObjects BI Suite
Lumira
Enterprise BI Server
Visual Analytics
Offce Analytics
Desktop
Server
Public
Spotfre Platform
Spotfre Cloud
Spotfre Event Analytics
Version
3
10.2.1
8.0
2012
2013
2013
365
9.4
11
11
4.1
4.4
6.2
5.1
8.1
6.0
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Figure 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria (Cont.)
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Vendor selection criteria
At least three of the four major functional BI components that Forrester believes are critical for large
enterprise BI environments: production and operational reporting, ad hoc querying, OLAP, and
dashboards.
The ability to query databases using SQL and MDX. While other querying technologies such as
XQuery and DMX are available, SQL and MDX are used most widely in large enterprises.
A complete, self-contained, fully functioning BI environment that is not technologically or functionally
tied or limited to particular functional or horizontal applications like ERP or SCM. To be considered, a
tool must be a complete, self-contained BI environment or platform that does not have to be
embedded in other applications.
Signifcant market presence: at least 100 in-production customers present in more than one major
geographical region and more than 10% of which are enterprise-grade installations that cross lines of
business and have more than 100 users.
Frequent interest from Forrester clients in the form of questions about or mentions of a vendor in the
context of inquiries about BI.
One of the top 11 vendors by BI revenues.
All products needed to be generally available by December 2013.
BI IS A BUYERS’ MARKET THAT OFFERS PLENTY OF CHOICES
Te evaluation uncovered a continuously evolving market in which (see Figure 3):
? SAP, IBM, SAS, Microsof, Oracle, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate lead
the pack. While many BI platform features are becoming commoditized, it’s not the individual
capabilities that diferentiate the Leaders, but rather the completeness, comprehensiveness, and
integration of the entire BI architectural stack. In addition to increasingly popular features
like analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, the Leaders also provide
the pixel-perfect, industrial-strength report writers that companies still need.
7
While many of
the Leaders appear to be closely grouped, each of them diferentiates itself in terms of specifc
individual capabilities, such as high scalability and tight integration with ETL, MDM, business
performance solutions, portals, and other highly relevant data management and information
delivery components. If one of our Leaders is already your enterprise’s preferred BI platform
provider, there may be little or no reason to look elsewhere for another specialized BI tool.
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? Tibco Sofware, QlikTech, and Tableau Sofware ofer highly competitive and diferentiated
options. Vendors in the Leaders category can by no means rest easy: the Strong Performers are
hot on their heels, especially where the main use case calls for business user self-service and
highly visual and intuitive analytics. In many specialized situations, these vendors can even
outshine and outperform the Leaders. Tibco Spotfre leads the market in highly visual streaming
analytics and business activity monitoring, tightly integrating it with process workfows, rules,
and advanced analytics to help enable the modern real-time enterprise. QlikView is hard to beat
in intuitive and spontaneous data exploration and discovery, providing a unique solution to the
age-old BI challenge “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Tableau Sofware’s diferentiation
goes well beyond technology: Its platform embeds most of the best practices that address the
human psychology of visual perception to produce the most intuitive visualizations.
Tis evaluation of the enterprise BI platform market is intended to be a starting point only. We
encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to ft their
individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.
Figure 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 ’13
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Go online to download
the Forrester Wave tool
for more detailed
product evaluations,
feature comparisons,
and customizable
rankings.
Risky
Bets Contenders Leaders
Strong
Performers
Strategy Weak Strong
Current
offering
Weak
Strong
Market presence
Full vendor participation
Incomplete vendor participation
Microsoft
SAP
Tableau Software
QlikTech
Tibco Software
Micro-
Strategy
Oracle
Actuate
Information Builders
SAS
IBM
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
Figure 3 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 ’13 (Cont.)
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
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MARKET PRESENCE
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Partnership ecosystem
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3.84
3.95
4.45
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All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
VENDOR PROFILES
Leaders
? SAP leads the market with broad BI innovations. Whether it’s SAP HANA for low latency, agile,
and in-memory analytics; Lumira for business user self-service; or Crystal for scalable, mission-
critical reports, SAP’s philosophy and strategy of “the best tool for each job” delivers on its
promise. Firms engage with SAP on BI to beneft from one-stop shopping for data management
(ETL, MDM, DW, and DQ), BI products including the HANA appliance, and SAP’s expertise
with business domain and industry vertical applications based on its ERP experience. Forrester
found that SAP BusinessObjects had excellent capabilities in analytics, BI customization via a
rich set of APIs, data integration, information delivery, MDM, performance management,
reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical architecture. SAP customers particularly
praised BusinessObjects’ data integration, information delivery technical architecture, analytics,
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operational capabilities, and SAP’s corporate and product vision. SAP is the vendor that Forrester
clients ask about most ofen in BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 36% of companies
use SAP for BI. One concern that we ofen hear about BusinessObjects is that innovation and
functional richness sometimes trump product-to-product integration; customers still are faced
with multiple UIs and cannot reuse some objects across products.
? IBM dwarfs its competitors in the breadth and completeness of BI capabilities. If you
want a single source to meet all your BI needs, and if those needs include sofware, hardware
(including mainframes), and professional services, no vendor can fully compete with IBM.
Clients know that they can rely on IBM Cognos because, unlike some of its competitors, IBM
puts a high priority on integration and stability, even at the expense of sometimes being late
to the market with certain capabilities, such as cloud BI sofware-as-a-service. Forrester found
that IBM Cognos had excellent capabilities in analytics, data integration, information delivery,
MDM, performance management, reporting and querying, scalability, and overall technical
architecture. IBM customers particularly praised Cognos’ analytics, performance management,
operational capabilities, reporting and querying, and technical architecture and IBM’s corporate
and product vision. IBM accounts for the sixth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent
survey data indicates that 31% of companies use Cognos for BI.
? SAS isn’t just about analytics — it also provides an enterprise-grade BI platform. Although
frms have known SAS as a leader in advanced and predictive analytics for years, don’t overlook
the fact that it also has a formidable BI platform. Firms engage with SAS on BI to beneft from
one-stop shopping for data management (ETL, MDM, and DQ), BI products including SAS
analytics appliances, expertise with business domain and industry vertical applications, and data
management professional services. Using SAS BI can also help clients reduce their dependence
on a single sofware vendor. Forrester found that SAS BI had excellent capabilities in data
integration, supported query languages, scalability, internationalization, BI customization with
a rich set of APIs, analytics, MDM, performance management, and reporting and querying. SAS
customers particularly praised its data integration, information delivery, technical architecture,
analytics, operational capabilities, and corporate and product vision. SAS accounts for the
eighth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 14% of
companies use SAS for BI. Concerns about SAS BI include a lack of pricing transparency and a
failure to ofer perpetual licenses.
? Microsof delivers a leading BI platform with a familiar Excel interface. Even if you’ve
standardized on other BI tools, you probably use, or at least have, Microsof BI components like
SQL Server, SharePoint, and Excel — so Microsof BI should be on your shortlist. Microsof’s
BI stack provides all of the necessary capabilities to support managed BI self-service. Business
users create BI content in their own sandboxes — via the BI features in Excel 2013 and the
cloud-based Power BI, which Microsof recently released into public preview — and collaborate
and share BI content via SharePoint. Tis allows IT to productionalize what users create and
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
share; for example, a Power Pivot model saved to SharePoint becomes an Analysis Services
cube that IT can productionalize with robust ETL and an enterprise-grade UI. Forrester found
that Microsof BI had excellent capabilities in query languages, availability of BI appliances,
internationalization, customization via a rich set of APIs, MDM, and reporting and querying.
Microsof customers particularly praised the vendor’s data integration capabilities. Microsof
tied for the second-highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
55% of companies use Microsof for BI. Concerns include the Microsof centricity of the BI
platform — it requires SQL Server, SharePoint, and Ofce) — and its heavy reliance on partners
for implementation and systems integration services.
? Oracle supports the only plug-and-play BI for complex ERP environments. Te latest versions
of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Oracle BI Applications, as well as the Fusion
versions of Oracle ERP, have one thing in common: a single metadata layer called the common
enterprise information model (CEIM). In an all-Oracle environment, merely installing the three
platforms delivers instant operational and analytical BI, with reporting directly out of ERP. CEIM
also facilitates “actionable BI,” whereby frms can take actions such as updating the transactional
applications (ERP, CRM) with little to no coding. Te recent acquisition of Endeca gives Oracle
BI additional capabilities to analyze and explore (using faceted navigation) hierarchical data that
doesn’t ft into traditional relational or multidimensional structures, such as product data with
complex, ragged, uneven, or unbalanced hierarchies. Oracle packages OBIEE, Endeca, Essbase,
and the TimesTen database with the Exalytics appliance; customers have a choice of relational,
multidimensional, hierarchical, and in-memory databases — covering most BI use cases. Oracle
accounts for the fourth highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
45% of companies use Oracle for BI. Concerns include a lack of desktop self-service BI tools and
the paucity of citable clients using OBIEE in heterogeneous non-Oracle environments.
? Information Builders can step in at any time with a platform to support all BI needs. If you
want to reduce your dependence on ERP and sofware stack vendors; need an integrated BI
platform that includes ETL, DQ, and MDM; have exotic data sources, including mainframe;
and really need a BI platform that can scale, Information Builders WebFocus is a top choice.
Forrester found that WebFocus had excellent data integration, information delivery, overall
technical architecture, scalability, analytics, MDM, performance management, reporting and
querying, and operational capabilities. WebFocus customers particularly praised its data access,
technical architecture, analytics, performance management, reporting and querying, and
operational capabilities and the vendor’s corporate and product vision. Information Builders
accounts for the 10th highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that
4% of companies use it for BI. Concerns include lack of desktop based self-service BI tools and
the fact that WebFocus is based on Information Builders’ 4GL Focus programming language.
While Focus has a 30-year, battle-tested history of handling very large data sets, some clients
are concerned that they will need to supplement the WebFocus GUI with good old-fashioned
coding in Focus for especially complex programming tasks.
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© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 18, 2013
? MicroStrategy shines with seamless architecture and a top mobile BI platform. MicroStrategy
has grown organically and architected its entire suite as a single platform. Forrester clients fnd
that, afer making the initial investment and efort in MicroStrategy, the reusability of all objects
and the relational OLAP engine with drill-anywhere capability ofen result in a lower long-term
total cost of ownership. We’ve also seen clients having the most success with enterprise-scalable
mobile BI applications delivered on the MicroStrategy platform. Forrester found that
MicroStrategy had excellent mobile information delivery, scalability, integrated metadata, and
reporting and querying functionality. MicroStrategy customers particularly praised the vendor’s
data access, information delivery, reporting and querying, operational capabilities, and corporate
and product vision. MicroStrategy accounts for the seventh highest number of Forrester BI
inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 9% of companies use it for BI. Concerns include its
high reliance on a largely disappearing network of partners, many of which have been acquired,
for architectural components like ETL, DQ, and MDM.
? Actuate is a top choice for scaling to millions of reports and users. Massive scalability —
interactive reporting applications producing output consumed by millions, not just thousands,
of users — is Actuate’s sweet spot. Its top use cases involve distributing complex, interactive
online statements to customers of large fnancial services institutions. Te Eclipse Foundation’s
BIRT, the basis of Actuate’s platform, is used by more than 3 million developers and is open
source — so it lends itself nicely to embedded BI and try-before-you-buy use cases. In 2013,
Actuate closed one of the gaps in its portfolio, business user self-service analytics, by acquiring
Quiterian. Forrester found that Actuate had excellent data access, information delivery,
scalability, integrated development environment (IDE), BI knowledge management, and
reporting and querying capabilities. Actuate accounts for the ninth highest number of Forrester
BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% of companies use Actuate for BI. Concerns
include its high reliance on a largely disappearing network of partners, many of which have
been acquired, for architectural components like ETL, DQ, and MDM.
Strong Performers
? Tibco Sofware excels in intuitive and interactive data visualizations and advanced analytics.
Tibco Spotfre is the space shuttle of in-memory analytics and advanced data visualization,
embedding more predictive analytical routines than its closest competitors. Spotfre also tightly
integrates with Tibco’s data, process, rule, and event management sofware — including the
recently acquired StreamBase — for real-time analytics, which includes advanced complex event
processing and business activity monitoring capabilities. Although Spotfre’s roots are in
deployments targeting power analysts and data scientists, today many organizations implement it
for all types of knowledge workers, from casual users to mobile executives. Forrester found that
Tibco Spotfre had excellent integration with process workfow and rules engines, cloud oferings,
analytics, data visualization, and MDM capabilities. Tibco accounts for the 11th highest number
of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey data indicates that 4% of companies use Spotfre for BI.
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Spotfre supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,
and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy
Spotfre in addition to, not instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
? QlikTech still shines with its unique, diferentiated in-memory 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. QlikView breaks through such barriers with associative
data architecture that exposes any-to-any relationships between entities and attributes. Business
users can explore these relationships, and uncover previously unknown information, just by
typing in a few keywords. Forrester found that QlikView had excellent capabilities in IDE
and collaborative BI. QlikTech customers particularly praised QlikView’s data access, data
integration, overall technical architecture, and analytics and QlikTech’s corporate and product
vision. QlikTech accounts for the ffh highest number of Forrester BI inquiries; recent survey
data indicates that 6% of companies use QlikView for BI. QlikView supports most enterprise
BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards, and data exploration, but does
not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy QlikView in addition to, not
instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
? Tableau Sofware is moving to disrupt the BI market with highly intuitive data visualization.
Building efective data visualization requires much more than just technology. Very few business
analysts have a background in data visualization best practices to answer questions like: Is a data
set best visualized using a scatter plot or a bar graph? How many diferent colors should a single
graph use? Can we put two graphs with diferent scales next to each other on a single dashboard?
Tableau can answer these and many other questions about best practices based on the psychology
of human visual perception. Its GUI and library of white papers clearly shows that this is
Tableau’s specialty. Forrester found that Tableau had excellent data visualization and Hadoop
integration capabilities. Tableau customers particularly praised the data access, information
delivery, overall technical architecture, metadata architecture, self-service BI, and operational
capabilities and the vendor’s corporate and product vision. Tableau tied for the second-highest
number of Forrester BI inquiries — a real feat for a vendor that wasn’t even on our radar screen
until just a few years ago. Recent survey data indicates that 5% of companies use Tableau for BI.
Tableau supports most enterprise BI use cases, such as analytics, data visualization, dashboards,
and data exploration, but does not support pixel-perfect reporting — so customers ofen deploy
Tableau in addition to, not instead of, a broader enterprise BI platform from another vendor.
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SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Online Resource
Te online version of Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings.
Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave
Forrester used a combination 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
conducted surveys with 94 of the vendors’ current customers.
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.
Afer 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 oferings 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. Tese 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. Te fnal scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current ofering,
strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product
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capabilities and vendor strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every
Forrester Wave evaluation follows, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-
wave-methodology.html.
Integrity Policy
All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, is conducted according to our
integrity policy. For more information, go tohttp://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-
policy.html.
Forrsights For Business Technology
Forrester’s Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012 was felded
to 634 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the
UK, and the US from small and medium-size business (SMB) and enterprise companies with 100
or more employees. All respondents reported working for companies that were currently using or
planning to use business intelligence (BI) technologies. Tis survey is part of Forrester’s Forrsights
for Business Technology and was felded during October 2012 and November 2012. Survey
respondent incentives included gif certifcates and research reports.
Each calendar year, Forrester’s Forrsights for Business Technology felds business-to-business
technology studies in more than 17 countries spanning North America, Latin America, Europe,
and developed and emerging Asia. For quality control, we carefully screen respondents according
to job title and function. Forrester’s Forrsights for Business Technology ensures that the fnal
survey population contains only those with signifcant involvement in the planning, funding, and
purchasing of IT products and services. Additionally, we set quotas for company size (number
of employees) and industry as a means of controlling the data distribution. Forrsights uses only
superior data sources and advanced data-cleaning techniques to ensure the highest data quality.
ENDNOTES
1
Self-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-friendly or intuitive interfaces. To learn how to maximize
your return on BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Self-Service Business
Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2012” report.
2
Continued economic uncertainty and major industry-changing dynamics like mobility and the shif to
digital business put a premium on data and information to facilitate strategic decision-making. Meanwhile,
the potential to mine and analyze vast quantities of data is transforming activities across the value chain.
Whether it’s optimizing the customer experience via social media or improving logistics by embedding
sensors in vehicles, data analysis is simply critical. To learn what capabilities are available and which will
best suit your organization’s needs, see the July 11, 2013, “TechRadar™: BI Analytics, Q3 2013” report.
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3
Enterprises fnd ADV platforms to be essential tools that enable them to monitor business, fnd patterns,
and take action to avoid threats and snatch opportunities. See the July 17, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™:
Advanced Data Visualization (ADV) Platforms, Q3 2012” report.
4
Self-service BI capabilities go well beyond user-friendly or intuitive interfaces. To maximize your return on
BI investment, see the June 12, 2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2
2012” report.
5
Predictive analytics enables frms to reduce risks, make intelligent decisions, and create diferentiated,
more personal customer experiences. But predictive analytics is hard to do without the right tools and
technologies, given the increasing challenge of storing, processing, and accessing the volume, velocity,
and variety of big data. In order to navigate the complex technology landscape, which will lead your
organization into the future of data advantage, see the January 3, 2013, “The Forrester Wave™: Big Data
Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q1 2013” report.
6
For more on ETL, refer to Forrester’s 60-criteria evaluation of enterprise ETL vendors. See the February 27,
2012, “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise ETL, Q1 2012” report.
7
Reporting is still No. 1 on users’ priority lists for adoption, with 81% implementations in frms’ business
units. Source: Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence And Big Data, Q4 2012.
Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to
global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 13 key roles at major companies providing proprietary
research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making
IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 108103
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