This year’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was a very exciting read, with multiple trends and comments worthy of note. One of the biggest developments was the recognition of the needs of the business user, with the business side emerging as a buyer and significant influencer of business intelligence solutions and decisions.
Ease of use becomes prime- for the first time
This year, companies reported that ease of use was more important than functionality as a primary buying criterion. This really recognizes two things – first, that many solutions have achieved a satisfactory breadth and depth of functionality, so that there is no killer feature that will drive a purchasing decision. This is not to say that all solutions calling themselves BI are the same -- Tableau, QlikTech, and Microstrategy all have very different offerings as a visualization tool, in-memory midmarket tool, and full on-premise enterprise analytical engine, respectively -- but that multiple vendors may have the combination of features that meet any given customer’s needs. Deciding among the short list will not be determined by features alone. At Birst, we see this clearly, from the number of times that we're in a short list vendor showdown with the same enterprise class BI companies, over and over again.
Second, the importance of ease of use recognizes that business intelligence is breaking out of the ivory tower and becoming more democratic – it is not just in the hands of business analysts who work for IT, but in the hands of business users who are using it to make day to day decisions. And the business user wants a faster, easier, more flexible solution. This is a powerful and positive development, since it means that fact-based decision-making is becoming more widespread, and effective business impact can happen through timely, accurate insight.
Business and IT work together on a “portfolio approach”
In the past few years, IT organizations have often been focused on vendor standardization and consolidation, with the belief that this will streamline their organization and make BI implementations more manageable. This standardization goal is often at odds with the business user’s desire for ease of use and flexibility, since the traditional vendors don’t necessarily have the most modern solutions that combine power and ease of use.
So business users have been striking out on their own, buying data discovery tools or departmental BI solutions using SaaS vendors. As a result, IT and business have had to achieve a balance of power, so that the gap is bridged between the different buying centers, approaches, and use cases. A portfolio of options for tackling business intelligence challenges has emerged, ranging from simple data visualization to SaaS BI to traditional on-premise BI.
Embracing new, modern vendors
The Gartner report further points out that traditional BI providers have been slow to embrace the business user challenge and develop the new delivery methods or provide the ease of use that business users are looking for. To achieve these goals and appease business users, companies have to reach beyond traditional vendors to pure play providers offering visualization, in-memory, or SaaS BI.
Up next – Gartner’s new coverage of SaaS BI.
