This page contains a small selection of the BI tool selection criteria (103) we have used to compare all the 16 major Business Intelligence tools that are available in the market. All the criteria are explained in more detail in the BI Tool Survey 2012 which is available for purchase. You may find the criteria useful for the selection of a BI & Reporting Platform for your own company or customer.
Infrastructure & architecture |
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| This category, which contains 24 criteria, measures how well a BI tool conforms to your IT infrastructure. Which operating systems and which computers and server platforms are supported, and how the Office Integration (2007,2010) is implemented. It also covers important aspects like reusability, caching, zero-footprint, load balancing, fail-over and In-Memory techniques. | ||
Security & connectivity |
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| This category, which contains 14 criteria, covers all aspects regarding the security, single sign-on, authentication, content authorization and so forth. In addition the connectivity is examined. Does the BI tool have native connectors to a wide range of data sources like SQL Server, Oracle, DB/2, MS Analysis Services (OLAP) et cetera.
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Core functionality |
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| This category, which contains 28 criteria, examines the core functionality (out-of-the-box) of the Business Intelligence tool. For example is there support for slowly changing dimensions and role-based dash boarding and reporting? And if so, to what degree? Is basket analysis supported? Are there facilities to export to PDF and Excel? Et cetera.
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| This category covers 12 criteria about performance management & planning facilities. Is there support for management models like the Balanced Scorecard and strategy maps out-of-the-box?
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Predictive Analysis |
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| This category, which contains 6 criteria, examines if and how data and text mining is supported and to what degree.
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| This category, which contains 8 significant criteria, measures the usability of the Business Intelligence tool. How easy-to-use and easy-to-learn is the product? Is Mobile BI (smart phones, tablets) supported? What type of graphs and visualizations can be used? And so forth.
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Performance issues |
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| In this category, 7 criteria are used to measure how well the BI tool supports techniques to optimize report and dashboard performance. For example: aggregate awareness, OLAP, MOLAP, ROLAP, reuse of the cache and so forth. | ||
Search & alerting |
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| This category covers 4 criteria about search on (meta) data and alerting & notification functionality.
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Costs & pricing* |
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| This category covers all kind of costs related to buying and having a BI tool. In the BI Tool Survey, the business intelligence vendors are asked to provide us all kinds of pricing information (100 users, 2000 users, 2 processors, 8 processors), pricing of end-user training, (advanced) designer training and how much you have to pay for support and maintenance. In the BI Tool Survey report you’ll only find a summary of the pricing per product, because these prices may vary per country, per company, and depend on if you are already a customer, and also the discount the vendor may be willing to give you at a specific time.
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General information |
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| This category provides general information about the vendor and the Business Intelligence tool like the product name(s) and the version number(s) that are examined. The number of installations worldwide and the number of resellers and partners is also available, but is not included in the BI Tool Survey 2012. If you need this information, please feel free to contact us. | ||
Performance management & planning
Usability & visualization
