Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
(5 February 2013 ID:G00239854)
IBM
Strengths
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IBM continues to maintain its leading position on the Completeness of Vision axis for this year's Magic Quadrant, as it scores very well on virtually all the vision criteria. In particular, IBM's overall marketing strategy strengthens the messaging of its core BI (Cognos) and predictive analytics (SPSS) acquisitions. This is not typical with most megavendor acquisitions. Also, customer feedback has improved, largely due to the continuous customer migration to IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.x from Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.
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IBM further expanded its BI and analytics offerings in 2012 through build — for example, IBM Cognos BI 10.2, Cognos Insight, SPSS Modeler 15, Analytical Decision Management 7.0 and
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Analytic Answers — and through acquisition — for example, Tealeaf Technology, Varicent Software and Vivisimo. Cognos Insight is a personal analytics product that can be deployed stand-alone on the desktop, or as an analysis and planning client as part of the Cognos server-based products. Analytical Decision Management enables organizations to automate, optimize and govern repeatable business decisions. The business analytics portfolio was enhanced by the acquisition of Varicent, a leading provider of analytics software for compensation and sales performance management.
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IBM improved its ability to address departmental, workgroup or smaller company business analytics requirements through the release of IBM Cognos Express 10.1, which provided comprehensive BI suite functionality along with budgeting, planning and forecasting capabilities at a lower license cost, but with a limitation of up to 100 end-user seats.
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Analytic Answers was another significant offering added recently. Gartner has predicted that, by 2014, up to 40% of analytics projects will be service-led and software-supported. IBM, delivering "analytics as a service," will enable organizations to mitigate one of the most critical nontechnical barriers to advanced analytics adoption: the lack of analytical skills. Analytic Answers is not simply a cloud offering that enables a shorter time to market, or turns capital expenditure into operating expenditure to encourage business analytics adoption. Rather, it is an analytics platform with prebuilt, domain-specific data models and embedded, relevant, statistical and advanced analytical algorithms that offer answers to industry-specific questions. This offering will enable IBM to effectively leverage its complete analytical assets — including analytical software, hardware, analytical knowledge, industrial practices, intellectual property and cloud delivery model — to allow maximum user access to IBM advanced analytics capabilities.
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According to this year's customer reference survey, nearly 60% of references are using Cognos BI 10.x, which is three times more than Cognos 8 BI. Also, more than 80% of 10.x references claimed Cognos as their BI standard. Gartner inquiries in 2012 were in line with the reference survey results that customers are, in general, satisfied with Cognos BI 10.x, and with the migration process.
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From the survey, the top reasons why customers select IBM are road map and future vision, product quality, and ability to integrate with information infrastructure (database, middleware). IBM's road map and future vision scored significantly above average; thus, it is weighted heavily in reference purchasing decisions.
Cautions
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Performance remains a concern, although primarily with the Cognos 8 BI base. When asked about problems with software, 24% of IBM references cited poor performance as a concern, compared with the industry average of 11.5% across all vendors. When asked about product-specific limitations to a wider deployment, 16% of references cited poor performance, compared with the industry average of 6.8%. IBM addresses this problem in 10.x by providing further query engine enhancements in 10.2 (in-memory ROLAP, aggregate awareness and so on).
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References continue to cite the Cognos products as more difficult to use. When asked about the most important reasons for choosing IBM, only 17.74% of references cited ease of use for end users, compared with the industry average of 35.1%, putting IBM in bottom quartile. Also, IBM references cited an average of 6.45 days to create a report, compared with the market average of 3.95 days, again ranking IBM in the bottom quartile. Readers should note that this statistic is a blended average of the time required to develop simple, moderately complex and complex reports. IBM has made usability a priority investment area, and this is reflected in the higher survey ratings for Cognos BI 10 versus Cognos 8 BI.
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References rated IBM as having slightly lower than average customer experiences, with support and sales interactions, along with product quality, rated in the lower quartile of all vendors reviewed in this research. However, Cognos BI 10 references continued to rate product functionality near the top of all vendors, and support, sales and product quality were rated better than for Cognos 8 BI.
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In the user activity section of the reference survey, IBM customers were above the average in the percentage of users viewing static reports — 49.67% compared with the industry average of 39%. Also, IBM customers were below average in the percentage of users performing interactive exploration and analysis of data, with 13.46% of IBM references compared with the industry average of 26.41%
Microsoft
Strengths
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Microsoft offers a competitive and expanding set of BI and analytics capabilities, packaging and pricing that appeal to Microsoft developers, its independent distributor channel, and now to business users through enhanced BI and data discovery capabilities in Excel 2013. The company's strategy has been to enhance the BI capabilities in three of its core offerings with each release — including Microsoft Office (specifically Excel), Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint — to increase their value and drive upgrades. Moreover, Microsoft hopes to leverage its cloud offering to enhance opportunities to grow its market share and deliver value by lowering cost of ownership and accelerating product enhancements and the adoption of new releases.
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By incorporating BI capabilities into its most ubiquitous products, and by removing deployment barriers, Microsoft virtually guarantees its BI offering's continued and even expanded adoption, particularly in organizations that have standardized on Microsoft for information management. As a result of this strategy, since the company's serious entry into the market in 2000, Microsoft's BI market share has grown steadily to take the No. 3 spot in 2011. With the new functionality added and planned for Microsoft Excel, we expect Microsoft's market share growth to continue.
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Microsoft's packaging strategy for BI and enterprise pricing often makes it a compelling license cost value proposition for organizations that want to deploy BI to a wider range of users, or that want to lower overall BI portfolio license costs by using lower-cost BI tools for basic BI functions. As Microsoft continues to enhance its BI capabilities in products that most companies already own and use (Excel, SQL Server and SharePoint), the functionality premium for alternatives may become increasingly difficult for many organizations to justify. In the Magic Quadrant customer survey, more Microsoft customers cite TCO and license cost as the No. 1 reasons for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor, as opposed to most other vendors in the survey. This has been the case for each of the past six years in which Gartner has run the survey.
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Nowhere will Microsoft's packaging strategy likely have a greater impact on the BI market than as a result of its recent and planned enhancements to Excel. Finally, with Office 2013, Excel is no longer the former 1997, 64K row-limited, tab-limited spreadsheet. It finally begins to deliver on Microsoft's long-awaited strategic road map and vision to make Excel not only the most widely deployed BI tool, but also the most functional business-user-oriented BI capability for reporting, dashboards and visual-based data discovery analysis. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to introduce a number of high-value and competitive enhancements to Excel, including geospatial and 3D analysis, and self-service ETL with search across internal and external data sources. These enhancements, along with planned support for analyzing large and diverse data (PolyBase, Microsoft's platform to enable a single query across relational and Hadoop data sources, is due in the first half of 2013), contribute to Microsoft's strong product vision score this year — one of six measures used to determine its positive movement in overall vision position.
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Microsoft Excel users are often disaffected business BI users who are unable to conduct the analysis they want using enterprise, IT-centric tools. Since these users are the typical target users of data discovery tool vendors, Microsoft's aggressive plans to enhance Excel will likely pose an additional competitive threat beyond the mainstreaming and integration of data discovery features as part of the other leading, IT-centric enterprise platforms. With the introduction of Office 2013, these target users will begin to have a compelling reason to use the BI and data discovery capabilities they already have in their beloved Excel. To have a material impact on the market, the challenge for Microsoft will be to reduce product release cycles (Office release cycles have been every two years or more) and condense customer release adoption cycles (most companies deploy one or more versions of Office behind the latest).
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Microsoft intends to address these significant barriers in 2013 by shortening product update cycles, while leveraging the cloud (Click-to-Run) to deploy the latest releases to users in a timely fashion. The success of this strategy largely depends on user adoption of Microsoft cloud offerings, which should roll out and be sold in full force in 2013.
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Microsoft's market success is also driven in part by its IT-oriented BI authoring tools within SQL Server, which are based on Visual Studio, the broadly adopted development environment.
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Microsoft continues to be viewed positively as a development environment with armies of global developers and developer partners skilled in Visual Studio .NET, and because it is building and selling analytic applications and solutions on top of the Microsoft stack. This approach, along with targeted marketing efforts and programs for building strong developer communities and support, has helped Microsoft lower the cost and expand the availability of its BI skills. In the Magic Quadrant survey, Microsoft customers rated its BI platform infrastructure among the highest compared with most other vendors, and a higher percentage of customers use it extensively. Moreover, "wide availability of skills" is among the top reasons why customers select Microsoft more often than all other competing vendors in the survey.
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OLAP continues to be a widely deployed capability of the Microsoft BI platform, with more than 90% of Microsoft customers reporting they use it. This is among the highest adoption compared with other vendors. This success can be attributed to the packaging of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services functionality, its use as an optimization layer in most Microsoft BI deployments, and because of its optimizations with Microsoft front-end tools. Building on the in-memory capabilities of PowerPivot in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a fully in-memory version of Microsoft Analysis Services cubes, based on the same data structure as PowerPivot, to address the needs of organizations that are turning to newer in-memory OLAP architectures over traditional, multidimensional OLAP architectures to support dynamic and interactive analysis of large datasets. Above-average performance ratings suggest that customers are happy with the in-memory improvements in SQL Server 2012 compared with SQL Server 2008 R2, which ranks below the survey average.
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While Microsoft's BI platform is attractive to SMBs, it is widely deployed in large enterprises as a standard with among the highest data volumes and user counts. Among the highest percentage of customers say they have standardized on the Microsoft BI platform. In addition, among the highest percentage of survey respondents of any vendor say they choose Microsoft because it is an enterprise standard, and because of the wide availability of skills. Like the other megavendors, stack centricity is evident among Microsoft customers, which use Microsoft Dynamics as their primary ERP two times more frequently than the survey average, and use Microsoft SQL Server as their primary enterprise data warehouse (EDW) almost three times more frequently than the survey average.
Cautions
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Microsoft, like the other megavendors, can meet some of the broadest range of functional requirements, and has among the highest RFP mapping scores of any vendor. However, customers using SQL Server 2012 rate the product functionality significantly higher than customers using SQL Server 2008 R2. While all SQL Server 2008 R2 functional scores are below the survey average, SQL Server 2012 metadata management, Office integration, search-based BI, OLAP, BI infrastructure capabilities, development tools, reporting and ad hoc query all received above-average ratings. Microsoft's weighted average product score across both product versions is in the bottom quartile, due to a smaller number of SQL Server 2012 customer respondents. Microsoft also rates among the highest in percentage of users that say absent or weak functionality is among the top problems they have with the software (this is mostly reported by SQL Server 2008 R2 customers). Similarly, product quality, support, performance and sales experience continue to be below average for SQL Server 2008 R2, but SQL Server 2012 customers report above-average experiences across the same measures. While Microsoft's partner-driven sales model drives global growth for the company, Gartner inquiries suggest that this approach often makes it difficult for customers to find their Microsoft sales representative. This frustration may be the source of downward pressure on
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Microsoft's sales experience scores. The dichotomy of results between SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 customers affected Microsoft's Ability to Execute position on this Magic Quadrant. As customers upgrade to SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013, we expect to see improved overall product, customer and sales experience results.
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Multiproduct complexity is a challenge. Because Microsoft's BI platform capabilities exist across three different tools (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint) that also perform non-BI functions, integrating the necessary components and building the applications is left to the organization. Microsoft's do-it-yourself approach puts more of the BI solution's development and integration onus for the platform components on customers, compared with the all-in-one purpose-built BI platforms offered by most other vendors in the BI market. Microsoft is depending on its cloud offerings to reduce the deployment complexity, particularly for smaller companies without the necessary skills. Partners, such as HP, have also stepped in to address this barrier to adoption with packaged offerings, including reference architectures and preloaded, integrated and configured appliances with Microsoft's BI components.
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Microsoft BI is primarily used for reporting by report consumers, as opposed to a broad spectrum of more advanced types of analysis. Microsoft BI capabilities tend to be used by an above-average percentage of users to total employees, as well as by an above-average percentage of external users, with most users — more than 65% identified as consumers or casual users — primarily using reporting and parameterized reports. Users' complexity of analysis score for Microsoft BI is also below the survey average. We expect this to change with the introduction and adoption of Office 2013, which includes a visual-based data discovery tool, Power View and other interactive analysis capabilities within Excel.
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Microsoft lags behind most other BI vendors in delivering mobile BI capabilities. It has been slow to deliver BI on mobile devices. Latent demand for Microsoft mobile BI is evident from the survey, with Microsoft customers reporting among the highest percentage of respondents (48%) planning to implement mobile in the next year — second only to Oracle, which has also lagged in delivering mobile capabilities.
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Microsoft CPM capabilities (for example, planning and budgeting) are limited to embedded functionality, such as financial reporting, in Microsoft Dynamics applications. As a result, Microsoft's performance management product strategy is limited compared with the other stack vendors (IBM, Oracle and SAP), which offer stand-alone CPM products that are also (at least in theory, or on the road map) integrated with the rest of their BI stacks. Microsoft instead relies on its partners, such as Tagetik and Board, to deliver Microsoft-based CPM solutions.
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Most companies buy Microsoft because of low license cost and overall low cost of ownership. In fact, licensing cost can be favorable because of packaging, for companies with enterprise licensing agreements, and for companies that move to Office 365. However, while Microsoft's total BI platform ownership cost (including license, hardware, implementation and ongoing development) is below average on a per-user basis, it tends to be consistent with other megavendors, mainly due to implementation and ongoing development costs, which compose more than 75% of three-year BI platform ownership costs, particularly in large deployments. There is evidence that the improved ease of use and lower report development times for SQL Server 2012, as well as the integration and upgrade benefits from cloud deployment, may help improve this cost curve for these Microsoft customers.
MicroStrategy
Strengths
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MicroStrategy specializes in enterprise BI deployments running on top of large EDWs. It is typically deployed in larger enterprises that consider it to be their enterprise BI standard. Its deployments remain among the most complex in terms of functionality, large numbers of users, high data volume and wide deployment across an enterprise, although it is not as distinctive from competitors as in the past.
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The BI platform was built from the ground up through completely organic development. The high level of integration of the individual platform components and the reusability of MicroStrategy's well-architected and object-oriented semantic layer are the result of this strategy. Another consequence is that customers identify product quality (which includes stability, reliability and being bug-free) as one of the top reasons for selecting MicroStrategy.
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By avoiding the hassle of integrating products from the acquisition of smaller vendors, MicroStrategy is able to spend more development effort in the core BI product, in reinforcing its enterprise-scale pedigree through initiatives for high performance across all layers of its platform, and in providing better administration tools to help manage complex deployments. Moreover, this approach frees the company's resources to have a bold innovation strategy in areas such as mobile, cloud and social.
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The heavy investment in mobile BI, initially on Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry devices and now on the Apple iPhone/iPad and Android devices, is paying off for MicroStrategy. The company is the Magic Quadrant leader in terms of adoption, with close to 50% of the surveyed customers actively using or piloting mobility for BI. In 2012, it was recognized by Gartner as having the broadest and most advanced set of mobile capabilities in the BI market (see "Critical Capabilities for Mobile BI"), and it has continued to evolve the mobile tool, adding new visualizations, improving performance and delivering tight integration with the data discovery tool (Visual Insight) and the cloud offerings. As a result, MicroStrategy is being considered for competitive bids in companies that see mobility as a strategic imperative; in some cases, it is even succeeding to replace or complement long-established BI vendors that lag behind in mobile BI.
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MicroStrategy has also embraced cloud BI as a strategic differentiator and is delivering a renewed set of solutions. Cloud Personal and Cloud Express (the entry-level and workgroup options) raise awareness in the market, but it is Cloud Platform that may become a game changer for the company. It provides a comprehensive solution by bundling ETL and database solutions with the full stack of MicroStrategy's BI tools and its own system optimization and administration services. This results in the capability to set up a new BI platform environment in a few days — scalability according to demand and potentially lower TCO. MicroStrategy claims to be gaining deals with this solution — including some large companies within and outside the current customer base, making the cloud offering its most successful product in the first year since launch.
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During 2012, MicroStrategy's data discovery tool, Visual Insight, was updated with new visualization capabilities, improved usability, additional analytic functions and better integration with the enterprise report-centric architecture, the mobile and cloud offerings. It is now a more capable product to prevent incursions in the customer base from competitors' products, and will help position MicroStrategy as a more friendly BI platform for users and developers. Going forward, it may become the standard interface for information analysis and report design.
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There are two other forward-looking focus areas for the company: Hadoop integration — for semistructured and unstructured data analysis, and for social data leveraging — through a connector that delivers Facebook profile data to a MicroStrategy analytic application. However, they don't have as much impact in the current installed base.
Cautions
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While the MicroStrategy development environment is robust and flexible, there is a steep learning curve, even for seasoned report developers building any level of analytic complexity into parameterized reports that simulate ad hoc analysis and interactive dashboards for business users. Even though usability enhancements were delivered with MicroStrategy 9.x (such as more one-click user actions, reusable dashboards and dashboard design wizards), its customers continue to rate the platform below average for ease of use for development and ease of use for end users. Mobile BI and Visual Insight adoption should contribute to resolve the issue and change this assessment, but their relevance is still low in the overall user base.
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MicroStrategy needs to continue working to improve overall usability because it may be a strong contributor to the survey's low score in the achievement of business benefits — a burden common to other large vendors, which is in stark contrast to the higher scores of small vendors with simpler BI tools.
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Although MicroStrategy has comparatively moderate administration costs per user compared with its competitors, its customers report above-average license and implementation costs per user. Moreover, "cost of software" is cited by its customers as the No. 1 product limitation to broader deployment — more frequently than for all other vendors in this year's Magic Quadrant survey (except Alteryx). Adopting MicroStrategy's Cloud Platform offering may be a way to address the issue and grow users at a lower overall cost. By bundling the different BI platform components — MicroStrategy's BI tools, partners' ETL and database software tools, and hardware and management services — customers will gain bargaining power to demand savings, but they will need to avoid vendor lock-in situations that may impact them in the future.
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MicroStrategy's high-end halo can be a liability in an unstable economy, with companies less keen for enterprisewide initiatives and searching for more cost-efficient solutions — often business-driven departmental deployments. Visual Insight and MicroStrategy Mobile are a good fit for this purpose, but the need to also deploy core BI platform components, with their associated price tags and complexities, will reduce MicroStrategy Mobile's appeal. As a result, MicroStrategy — when acting as an all-or-nothing option — will struggle to find a position as a complementary tool in companies with competitors' platforms; in turn, it will see smaller vendors — namely from the data discovery space — do the same to its own customer base.
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MicroStrategy Express is a clear answer to both of these problems, but it remains to be seen whether MicroStrategy and its IT and corporate-focused sales force will be able to succeed in a business-managed, departmental BI market.
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Conversely, the company continues to sell predominantly to IT, which has a stack-centric buying tendency. Megavendors offering end-to-end BI, CPM, packaged analytic applications and integration middleware optimized for their specific enterprise applications and technology stacks are at an advantage over MicroStrategy when stack optimization is an important purchasing criterion. MicroStrategy's focus on BI platforms excludes it from consideration, particularly in enterprise BI standardization projects wherein buyers are looking for single-stack optimizations with the existing information and application infrastructure.
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This year's Magic Quadrant has a reinforced focus on analytic capabilities beyond descriptive and diagnostic analytics, which hurts MicroStrategy's position in Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. The lack of a noticeable focus on predictive and prescriptive analytics narrows MicroStrategy's breadth of use (which is already below average) to mostly reporting and dashboarding, lowers its complexity of use cases and will ultimately reduce its relevance for organizations. Although the company offers native data mining capabilities free of charge, and has delivered R language integration since January 2012, these features continue to be ignored by customers. MicroStrategy has the lowest usage of predictive analytics of all vendors in the Magic Quadrant. A reason for this behavior might be the user interface that is overfocused on report design conventions and lacks proper data mining workbench capabilities, such as analysis flow design, thus failing to appeal to power users. To address this matter, MicroStrategy should deliver a new high-end user interface for advanced users, or consumerize the analytic capabilities for mainstream usage by embedding them in Visual Insight.
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After several quarters of good financial results, MicroStrategy had a sharp decline in sales execution in 3Q12. Changes in the sales management might be the issue that affected the company's performance, because it is difficult to establish a correlation with any other relevant fact that may be hurting MicroStrategy's position in the market. If the assumption is correct, then we should see a rebound in results in 2013, and MicroStrategy's Ability to Execute in the Magic Quadrant will also recover.
Oracle
Strengths
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Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, with its principal component Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), is an IT-driven, unified metadata-centric BI and analytics platform that's best suited for building large, IT-managed and centrally governed global deployments in which a broad range of BI, advanced analytics and CPM functionality from a single platform and optimization with the Oracle stack are top requirements. OBIEE customers report among the largest average deployment sizes in terms of users, data and company size, with an above-average number of respondents viewing OBIEE as their enterprise BI standard.
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Customers choose Oracle because of its integration and optimizations with the broader Oracle stack, which are key differentiators that underpin Oracle's BI and analytics value proposition, particularly within the Oracle installed base. Specifically, Oracle BI offers more than 80 prebuilt analytic applications for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, Fusion (on-premises and in the cloud) and other enterprise applications, including a range of domain and industry-specific packaged analytic applications. These analytic applications include prebuilt ETL, data warehouse models, KPIs, reports and dashboards. OBIEE's analytics optimizations with Oracle Essbase and the Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System enable customers to implement an end-to-end analytic process for the financial budgeting, planning, consolidation and close processes. OBIEE analytics optimizations with Oracle middleware and Oracle SOA Suite components, Oracle BPM for BPEL, provide integration with action links and workflow within Oracle EBS to support closed-loop insight to action analytics processes. Moreover, Oracle has planned integration between OBIEE, Oracle Complex Event Processing and Oracle Real-Time Decisions to support real-time event detection and analysis. As evidence of Oracle's strong stack value proposition, OBIEE customers in the Magic Quadrant survey choose Oracle more often than most other vendors in the survey because of its integration with enterprise applications and with the information management infrastructure (database and middleware). Furthermore, 54% of OBIEE customers have Oracle EBS as their primary ERP system (almost 3.5 times the survey average), while 80% report using the Oracle Database as their primary data warehouse (more than 2.8 times the survey average).
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In addition to Oracle software stack optimizations, Oracle's newest engineered system, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, provides an optimized hardware and software configuration that includes OBIEE, Oracle Essbase, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, and in-memory software (based on Oracle's acquisition of TimesTen) designed for large and complex analytics workloads, including dynamic planning and what-if and scenario analysis.
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Oracle has long been a leader in information management and analytics for structured, mostly enterprise transaction data, but Oracle's 2011 acquisition of Endeca — now called Oracle Endeca Information Discovery — demonstrated product vision and commitment to the growing importance and potential value to Oracle customers of incorporating, relating and analyzing unstructured data for new insights. While Oracle Endeca Information Discovery platform immediately filled a gap for Oracle in business-user-oriented search-based data discovery, the more strategic road map for Oracle is to integrate Endeca assets for analyzing diverse data into Oracle's core information management, middleware and enterprise applications stack, which was recently done with EBS Extensions for Oracle Endeca. Moreover, Oracle introduced the Oracle Big Data Appliance for NoSQL and Hadoop support. OBIEE customers appear to buy into this vision, with more than 22% of them — among the highest in the survey — reporting plans to deploy content analytics in the next 12 months.
Cautions
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While Oracle offers business user search-based data discovery with the Endeca Information Discovery platform, it has been slower than its megavendor competitors to deliver business user data mashup and interactive visualization capabilities within OBIEE. Even though some additional interactive capabilities are enabled by the combined in-memory and enhanced Essbase features in Exalytics, Oracle customers rate its interactive visualization functionality in OBIEE near the bottom of the survey. Because of this limitation, as well as longer than average report development times, Oracle continues to score near the bottom of the survey for ease of use for end users and ease of use for developers. These survey results do not appear to reflect the enhancements Oracle has made to its interactive visualization capabilities in its latest releases of OBIEE and in Exalytics, since more than half of Oracle's survey respondents are not upgraded to the latest releases. Users may find improved ease of use when they upgrade.
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Oracle has been slower than most of its competitors to deliver mobile analytics with broad device support. Mobile capabilities are currently limited to iOS devices, although Android and Windows support is on the road map. This delay appears to have caused latent demand in the OBIEE installed base, as Oracle has the highest percentage of any vendor with customers that plan to adopt mobile in the next year. Since no additional development is necessary for deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile, this will facilitate adoption.
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Oracle's customer experience ratings, which include support and product quality, as well as sales experience and performance scores, continue to be a chronic weakness. They have been consistently low for the third year in a row — and the same has been true for most of the other megavendors — with scores near the bottom of the survey. While Oracle and the other megavendors tend to have the largest and most complex global deployments, which can contribute to the relatively harsh customer assessments, other vendors with similarly large and complex deployments (like Information Builders and MicroStrategy) tend to consistently, year after year, fare much better.
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Oracle offers a broad suite of relatively integrated, functional capabilities, placing it in the top quartile of 38 organizations surveyed for this Magic Quadrant research — when assessing the number of individual features and functions delivered by Oracle. However, an assessment of the extent to which these features meet requirements shows that customers give Oracle an aggregate product rating of below average, with a rank of 34 out of 38 vendors, with all 14 capabilities receiving a below-average functional rating score. Dashboard capabilities were the highest rated out of the 14 functional areas assessed by Gartner, with more than 65% of OBIEE customers using it extensively.
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OBIEE is primarily used for systems of record, static and parameterized reporting, as well as dashboards centrally developed by IT and delivered to report consumers, leading to a below-average complexity of user analysis ratings. OBIEE customers report that, on average, 70% of OBIEE users are consumers or casual business users, with 86% of users viewing static or parameterized reports. While Oracle offers data scientist and developer-oriented predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities that are similar to deployment patterns in the broader market, they are not widely adopted. Making more complex types of analysis and advanced analytics more broadly accessible to business users is a major driver of growth in the BI market — a trend that Oracle has been slower to fully address than other stack vendors.
QlikTech
Strengths
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QlikView, QlikTech's product, is a market leader in data discovery, a segment of the BI market it pioneered. QlikView is a self-contained BI platform, based on an in-memory data store and newly added direct query access (currently to Teradata, Google BigQuery and Cloudera, with more sources to come in the near future), with a set of well-integrated BI tools.
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Customers choose QlikView because of its intuitive interactive experience — most often deployed in dashboards — that enables business users to freely explore and find connections, patterns and outliers in data without having to model those relationships in advance. QlikTech earned top rankings for the percentage of customers that choose the platform for ease of use for end users, with an above-average percentage selecting QlikView for ease of use for development, and the highest percentage of customers of any vendor choosing QlikView because of implementation cost and effort.
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QlikView's ease of use is coupled with above-average complexity of the types of analysis users can conduct with the platform, and an above-average breadth of functionality used.
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QlikTech's customers also report achieving above-average business benefits, particularly in making better information available to more users and in expanding the type of analysis undertaken. This powerful combination of advantages has been a key driver of data discovery vendor success in general, and of QlikView in particular.
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QlikView's interactive experience is enhanced by its in-memory computing model. QlikView customers report near the top of the survey's performance scores (albeit on smaller-than-average data sizes), although this differentiator is narrowing since most of the BI vendors now deliver in-memory capabilities.
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QlikView customers have a positive view of seven out of 14 functional capabilities rated in the Magic Quadrant survey, including reporting, ad hoc analysis, dashboards, interactive visualization, scorecards, search-based data discovery and mobile BI. The top reasons for choosing QlikView are: (1) functionality; (2) ease of use for end users; and (3) performance. A positive product experience has contributed to QlikView customers having a positive view of its future. QlikView has among the smallest percentage of customers that plan to discontinue using the product in the future, and report among the top success scores — which are defined as expanded user deployments — of any vendor in the survey.
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QlikTech's acquisition of Expressor and the subsequent release of QlikView's Governance Dashboard give QlikView customers a way to identify and resolve the use of multiple definitions deployed across existing QlikView applications, and to create reusable metadata components for new development. The lack of these capabilities had often prevented it from being considered as an enterprise standard, and from winning large enterprise deals. Now, QlikView has a compelling approach to govern data definitions without sacrificing business user development flexibility to build applications, and without having to wait for centralized IT to first build a semantic model. This was also a necessary addition to QlikView's portfolio to compete against the enterprise IT-centric BI vendors, which have added data discovery features to their platforms.
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QlikTech, which was founded in Sweden, has been successful at globally expanding its market reach and awareness beyond its traditional stronghold in Europe to North America. It has also been successful at growing regions in Asia/Pacific and Latin America. QlikTech has a large and global partner ecosystem, particularly when compared with its stand-alone data discovery vendor peers.
Cautions
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Customers most often select QlikView for ease of use for end users, particularly for interactive dashboards; however, the visual-based interactive exploration and analysis capabilities, experience, and time to business user authoring proficiency are generally viewed as inferior to those of its stand-alone data discovery competitors, Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. The next major release of QlikView, which is due for launch in 2013, places major emphasis on addressing this competitive limitation with a major design theme focused on delivering a "gorgeous and genius" experience. While a major update to the platform will help QlikTech better compete against the stand-alone data discovery vendors, as well as against the enterprise features of the traditional BI players (for example, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle, Information Builders and MicroStrategy), it is not without the risk of disruption for customers at a time when QlikTech is also facing a more intense competitive landscape from these same vendors.
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While Gartner estimates that the data discovery segment grew at three times the rate of the overall BI market in 2011, and QlikView was the leader in this segment, data discovery capabilities are now becoming mainstream. The market is more crowded with existing, stand-alone vendors becoming more competitive, new vendors emerging, and all leading BI vendors having added data discovery capabilities to their IT-centric platforms in 2012 as an integrated, and often bundled, license-cost-free feature, with the intent of narrowing QlikView's (and the other stand-alone data discovery vendors') opportunities for expansion.
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Enterprise readiness and user scalability are ongoing concerns. QlikView earned below-average customer survey scores on enterprise features, such as metadata management (we expect this assessment to improve as adoption of Expressor spreads among QlikView customers), BI infrastructure and BI development tools. Additionally, customers and implementers continue to express concerns over QlikView facilities for managing security and administering to large numbers of users. Scaling QlikView to more users, larger data sizes and more complex dashboards is directly correlated with hardware resources, such as RAM and processing power. While QlikView user deployment sizes and average data sizes continue to increase, they are still below the survey average and below its data discovery competitors. QlikView data sizes, although slightly up from last year, may have been limited by QlikView's in-memory-only approach versus competitors that could directly query and bring in data from warehouses well before QlikView's recent Direct Discovery capability was available. With QlikView's newly added capabilities, data scalability should increase, while QlikTech's acquisition of Expressor should address metadata concerns. Moreover, the rearchitected version of QlikView that's planned for 2013 is intended to significantly enhance a range of enterprise development and scalability features.
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Customer experience results, while improved from last year, are a mixed bag. QlikView earned positive product quality scores, and a smaller percentage of customers reported problems with the software, which resulted in an overall above-average customer experience score. However, QlikView continued to suffer from just below the survey average (third quartile) support scores. Similarly, sales experience continues to be below the survey average. Gartner inquiries suggest that the direct sales team is often perceived as inflexible and unresponsive. We continue to believe that these results can partly be affected by QlikView's rapid growth, since support and sales proficiency are highly correlated with length of tenure.
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High growth means a larger percentage of relatively new sales and support people. However, we expect to see continued improvement next year (as we did this year) as QlikTech scales its processes to support growth, a broader partner channel and expansion into larger enterprise deployments.
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QlikView customers often express concerns over the scalability of its predominantly named user pricing model. Cost of software is reported as the largest barrier to broader deployment by companies that have implemented QlikView. While named user pricing has the advantage of giving every QlikView user access to full authoring capability, it is relatively costly on a per-user basis for a very large number of users when compared with many competing alternatives. This pricing model well-supported QlikTech's departmental "land and expand" sales approach, which allowed the company to add 100 seats at a time, department by department, with minimal discounting. However, as QlikTech seeks more enterprise deals, and as procurement departments begin to manage QlikView purchases across departments, the pressure to discount has increased. Despite its strong market position and compelling value proposition, it is likely to be increasingly difficult for QlikTech to defend its premium price position as it competes for larger deals, and as competition from bundled enterprise alternatives intensifies.
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QlikView users reported among the longest report development turnaround times — particularly for building large, complex reports from various data sources, involving detailed logic and calculations — of any vendor in the Magic Quadrant. We expect this to improve as the next version of QlikView rolls out more enterprise features targeted at developer efficiencies, and as more of its customers adopt Expressor and take advantage of reusable metadata components, rather than having to script the data integration for each QlikView application.
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A below-average percentage of users claim they are using QlikView for static reporting, indicating that this falls outside of QlikView's sweet spot. Customers that need a range of systems of record reporting and interactive dashboards and visualization from a single tool are less likely to choose QlikView.
SAP
Strengths
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SAP is the global market share leader of the BI and analytics platforms market. Its large customer base is indicative of future maintenance revenue, which can be allocated to R&D and merger-and-acquisition initiatives to drive products forward. SAP's market share dominance shows in its high proportion of large enterprise deployments. SAP customers average twice as many users as the market average across all vendors. SAP is frequently cited by customers as the enterprise standard BI and analytics platform. SAP's propensity to be the enterprise standard extends to the breadth of deployment. When asked how extensively this BI vendor is deployed — from departmentally to globally deployed — SAP ranked No. 1 across all 38 vendors surveyed in Gartner's most recent customer survey.
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Based on evidence from Gartner inquiries, SAP closed a significant number of multimillion dollar deals in 2012. Its substantial commercial success is largely due to its product marketing efforts targeting the SAP enterprise application base, as well as its capabilities for large enterprise deployments, as indicated in the survey. The aggressive bundling and stack-centric messaging has resulted in strong product sales. Compared with the average across all vendors, three times the percentage of SAP customers cited "integrates with enterprise applications" as one of the top reasons for choosing the vendor.
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SAP has one of the largest global direct sales, support, channel and service ecosystems. The major system integrators all have large SAP and BusinessObjects practices. This strength will be particularly helpful as SAP applies its BI solutions to specific industry business processes and domain-specific analytic applications. It also provides access to skills on a global basis for different industries and companies of different sizes. Access to people (internal or external) who know SAP BW or BusinessObjects is rarely difficult. SAP scored well-above average, compared with other vendors, when customers were asked if access to skills was one of the most important reasons for choosing the vendor.
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SAP responded to the market's changing dynamics by investing in a nascent data discovery offering, SAP Visual Intelligence. This was initially limited to just Hana as a data source, but is now able to access a variety of data sources, and to take advantage of SAP's data acquisition, enrichment, and transformation capabilities, which were designed for ease of use by mainstream business users.
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While it has been in the mobile BI space for more than 10 years, in 2012, SAP enhanced its mobile experience with geospatial and camera capabilities, enabling users to view information in camera view over the visual representation. SAP offers an integrated mobile BI toolkit so that developers can leverage the SAP Mobile Platform, (formerly known as Sybase Unwired Platform), thereby offering customer mobile analytics app design, device management and device security. Also, with the latest release of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Feature Pack 3 (FP3), SAP offers full 2-way integration of SAP StreamWork into the BI platform, allowing users to see decisions in which BI content is being leveraged and request participation, or to follow the progress if they are already included.
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SAP Predictive Analysis, introduced in 2012, bolstered its predictive analytics offering by integrating analytical capabilities already built in R with the real-time and in-memory capabilities of Hana to create some new, advanced analytic use cases. By leveraging its Data Services integration with Hadoop, Hive and other big data processing and map-reduce technologies, SAP is able to store this information inside SAP Hana and provide analytic applications on top, including CO-PA Accelerator, Customer Segmentation Accelerator, and Business Planning and Consolidation.
Cautions
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When respondents were asked which product-specific limitations were barriers to wider deployment, more SAP respondents cited software quality than for any other vendor. Of all SAP's references, 20.17% cited this limitation, compared with an average of 6.2% across all vendor references. When asked about problems with the software, a greater percentage of SAP references cited "unreliable, unstable and/or buggy" than for any other vendor in the Magic Quadrant. Much of this poor product quality can be attributed to the challenge of integrating and supporting multiple code bases, such as BW, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and Dashboards. However, there is significant improvement within references running later versions. For example, 29.63% of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references cited this problem, compared with just 16.67% of SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references.
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In addition to poor product quality, customers have complained about unsatisfactory support. In our latest survey, SAP ranked last in customer experience and sales experience. Unfortunately for SAP customers, it isn't a matter of just one bad year, because SAP has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of customer support since Gartner started this series of surveys in 2008. However, there has been some improvement. SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references averaged 4.32 (on a scale of 1 through 7) for its support rating, compared with an average of 5.0 among SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references. Nevertheless, both groups scored below the 5.71 average across all vendors' references. The same is true for the sales experience score. SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references averaged 4.15 (on a scale of 1 through 7), compared with an average of 4.94 for SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references. While there was improvement, again, both groups are well below the 5.77 average across all vendors' references.
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When compared with other vendors in the survey, SAP scored below average across all 15 BI platform capabilities evaluated during the Magic Quadrant research process. Of those capabilities, SAP BusinessObjects customers identified reporting and ad hoc query functionality as the platform's top strengths. SAP customer references using SAP BI 4.0 FP3 scored product functionality and overall product satisfaction much higher than SAP customers that were not running the very latest release. For example, references running 4.0 FP3 rated SAP's ad hoc query capability 8.75 on a scale of 1 through 10, compared with references running SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1, which rated ad hoc query only 7.74 on the same scale. Microsoft Office integration was rated 8.10 across all SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references, compared with SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references, which rated this capability 7.05. Comparing references across versions also saw a wide variance for the mobile BI capability. SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references rated this capability 5.9, while SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references rated it 8.10.
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This pattern of SAP's FP3 references scoring better than SAP's legacy customers (but still below the industry average) occurs in several other areas. For example, when references were asked about complexity of migration on a scale of 1 through 4 (with 4 being the most complex), SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references scored 2.67, compared with SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references, which scored 2.06 (lower is better, but still below the industry average of 1.65 across all vendors' references). When asked about the average number of days to create a report, SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 references averaged 6.77 days, compared with 5.43 days for SAP BI 4.0 FP3 references. Keep in mind that the overall average across all vendors' references was just 3.95 days.
SAS
Strengths
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SAS's portfolio includes tools in areas such as BI, performance management, data warehousing and data quality; however, unlike most other BI platform vendors, SAS primarily focuses on advanced analytical techniques, such as data mining and predictive modeling, where references acknowledge it as a leader. SAS's clients report the use of large datasets and perform analysis with above-average complexity. They also access and interpret unstructured internal and external data more often than most vendors' clients surveyed for this Magic Quadrant. Such positioning benefits SAS in this year's Magic Quadrant, where basic BI capabilities got a lower weighting than in previous years.
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SAS gets high marks for its global footprint and broad industry initiatives. The solution-oriented analytic application approach to the market is a differentiator, giving the company the advantage of having a wide variety of cross-functional and vertically specific analytic applications out of the box for a wide variety of industries, including financial services, life sciences, retail, communications and manufacturing. Thus, SAS's sales processes can be diverted from tool features and price comparisons to a discussion of potential business value of solutions and industry expertise. While others are also adopting this approach, SAS remains in the lead.
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In 2012, SAS announced Visual Analytics, the new data discovery product that merges dashboard design with diagnostic analytics and the use of predictive models — a possibility not yet available in some of its competitors' tools. Visual Analytics also provides mobile BI capabilities — a gap that, until now, had been resolved through a partnership with MeLLmo Roambi. Moreover, it is the first visible result of a comprehensive initiative to standardize user interfaces and to better integrate the product portfolio — an area where SAS scores lower than most other vendors in the Magic Quadrant survey. For SAS, it's also a key instrument to reach beyond analytics experts to a more mainstream audience, thereby preventing competitors' data discovery tools from doing so on its customer base. With the aggressive pricing and strong push being made by the company on what looks a promising product, we expect to see good customer adoption in the coming months.
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Data access and integration and the capability to support large volumes of data are the primary drivers for adoption, according to the survey. SAS's recent efforts around its High-Performance Analytics Server for in-memory, in-database and grid computing analytics will likely reinforce this trend. Availability of skills is also cited — the result of a wide and loyal user base, many of whom have built careers around these products. A broad sales and service ecosystem, coupled with above-average results on sales relationship and positive survey references for product road map and future vision, will continue propelling SAS. Reference customers confirm this by predicting a positive outlook for SAS's success within their organizations, as well as in the market as a whole.
Cautions
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References continue to report that SAS is very difficult to implement and use — it was the No. 3 vendor in both categories. Aggravating this, although it has a worldwide network of support centers and an extensive list of service partners, SAS's customer experience and product support are in the lower quartile of vendors in the Magic Quadrant. A revision of user interfaces and an enhancement of product integration is under way to help improve the customer experience, but SAS must also improve its level of service — including level of expertise, response time and time to resolution.
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SAS's dominance in predictive analytics and statistics continues to be challenged on many fronts. IBM is still the main challenger with SPSS and other analytic assets, but wide support of open-source R by large competitors, such as Oracle, SAP and other smaller vendors, will be the most serious threat in the long term. R is challenging SAS for the title of standard coding language for analytics, and is increasingly considered a credible alternative by professionals in the market, eroding SAS's dominance in the analytics community. Other vendors, such as Kxen (not included in this Magic Quadrant), Prognoz, Alteryx or Tibco, are additional sources of competition as more customers adopt analytics. These hardened challengers may not be a severe problem for SAS, however. The growing analytics market is a "rising tide" for every participant, and SAS, being the experienced leader, will be able to capture a significant share of it.
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Customer references report that cost is the most common factor blocking further adoption, and they cite low results in the achievement of business benefits. Moreover, they mention — three times more than the average — the inability to gain user buy-in to an enterprise approach. With more options available, these factors may lead to a growing adoption of tactical analytics solutions from smaller vendors. SAS should remain responsive to customers and prospects in these areas.
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Despite SAS's success and awareness as a leader in the predictive analytics space, the company is still challenged to make it onto BI platform shortlist evaluations when predictive analytics is not a primary business requirement. It's significant that less than 50% of references — compared with 60% from last year — indicated that SAS was their company's BI standard. Functionality used in traditional BI areas (reporting, dashboards, OLAP and so on) was lower than for other BI leaders in this research. Like last year, ad hoc query remains the one exception, with clients aggressively using SAS BI for that component.
Source: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1DYXHVT&ct=130206&st=sg
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