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In Context, by Doug Henschen
Doug Henschen joined Intelligent Enterprise as Editor in 2004 and was named Editor-in-Chief in January 2007. He has specialized in covering the intersection of business intelligence, performance management, business process management and rules management technologies within enterprise applications and architectures. See More by Doug Henschen Who's Buying What in BI?
What are firms in your industry buying? What are firms of your size buying? What are IT types using and and what are business types using? When it comes to business intelligence software, you'll find answers to all these questions in Nigel Pendse's "The BI Survey 8." As I explain in this article, there are more than 350 charts and 490 pages in "The BI Survey 8." As one of a handful of media sponsors to the survey, Intelligent Enterprise is entitled to share just a peek at the report. To give you some sense of where the more than 2,600 respondents stand on the best-known BI product out there, I obtained approval to share these four charts:  Reasons Given For Choosing Nominated Products (click image for larger view) "Reasons Given for Choosing Nominated Products Chart" (click on the chart at right) shows why respondents chose the product they described as their primary BI product when completing the survey. The number of respondents for each product is shown in parentheses after the product name. Averages for all products are shown at the top of the chart. Better-than-average results are shown in green and below-average ratings are in red. If you look at QlikView, for example, it was selected more often than average for its "ease of use for end users" and "ease of use for application builders"; it was selected less often than average for its "ability to support large numbers of end users" and its "Web architecture."  Industry Sector Analysis By Product (click image for larger view) The "Industry Sector Analysis by Product" chart (click on the chart at left) shows higher-than-average representation in an industry in green and below-average representation in red. Information Builders' WebFocus, as an example, has a higher-than-average presence in insurance, health-care and government and a lower-than-average representation in consumer package goods manufacturing and media and publishing.  Respondent Roles By Product and Vendor (click image for larger view) The "Respondent Roles by Product and Vendor" chart (click on the thumbnail at right) shows the proportion of technical and business users, with above-average results in green and below-average results in red. I guess it's not surprising that Actuate, an open source product, had the highest proportion of technical respondents, followed by Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Cognos Analysis had a much more business-oriented user profile than did Cognos Reporting.  Median Customer Headcount By Product / Vendor (click image for larger view) One chart I didn't discuss in my article was this depiction of "Median Customer Headcount by Product/Vendor" (click on the thumbnail). As the title indicates, these are median companywide headcounts (not the median number of BI seats deployed). I wouldn't assume that products with a low median can't scale or that products with a high median deployment aren't appropriate for a small or midsized enterprise. On the other hand, I would do some investigating if the scale of your organization is out of sync with these median values. It could be that the product in question is technically capable of meeting your needs, but it may be that the deployment and licensing costs aren't the best fit for the scale of deployment you have in mind. Similarly, an above-average presence in your industry is not a guarantee that you will be happy with a particular product, but it's comforting to know whether a vendor is used to dealing with the challenges in your industry. What's more, these vendors likely couldn't sustain a higher-than-average presence in a particular industry if their software wasn't well suited to that environment. Of course, if you want much more detail on 23 products covered in "The BI Survey 8," you'll have to buy the full report, which costs $4,995. It includes lots of insight that was completely off limits to journalists, including eight aggregated ratings and 26 product-by-product measures of selections wins, deployment depth, success rates, implementation times, product reliability, customer loyalty and so on. Keep in mind that this is a survey; a sampling of customer opinions -- albeit a very thorough and statistically relevant sampling. If it's hands-on product reviews you're after -- with detailed insight on features and functions in the latest versions of software available -- I'd recommend Cindi Howson's BIScorecard reviews.  This is a public forum. United Business Media and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. United Business Media makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers. 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