Ranking the BI tools by category
Click on the links below to see what graphs and scores are available in the BI Tool Survey Report. The names of the BI tools are on this webpage replaced by a generic name. In the BI Tool Survey report we used of course the real names of the products.
- BI Tool Functionality
- Ease-of-Use
- Infrastructure and architecture
- Security and connectivity
- Search and alerting
- Totals across all categories
BI Tool Functionality
In the graph below, the BI tools are ranked by completeness in specific BI functionality. Their position has been calculated by awarding one point for each criterion for which a positive answer (‘Yes’) was received and adding up the points.
In some cases, half points were awarded when the required functionality was only partly available. If the answer was ‘Yes, but’, then this concerns functionality that is available, but cannot be very easily used.
The maximum number of points was 24.
Ease-of-Use
A maximum of thirteen points awarded to the BI tool for its ease-of-use and visualization. A maximum of two points was awarded for each of the ease-of-use attributes, If the verdict was negative, then one point was deducted. Some basic features were not included in the basic price but were available as paid options; we deducted half a point if this was the case.
There is a big difference between a BI tool offering various options and features, and making them easy enough for everyone to use. A number of BI tools offer certain features that can only be used by people with extensive technical experience. In these cases it was decided not to include this functionality in the final score, because the advantage compared with 'normal programming' was too small. We assumed that for a feature to work efficiently, it had, to some extent, to be implemented in an easy-to-use graphical interface. If you only intend your BI tool to be used by highly trained IT professionals this may less relevant.
Infrastructure and architecture
The importance of infrastructure and architecture is directly linked to the importance of the solution being built. If Business Intelligence is considered an unimportant topic by the business leaders in an organisation then it becomes a niche product with little or no importance and the information might as well be produced in spreadsheets since the accuracy is also of little relevance. If however it is the intention to use the information from the BI system to alter (improve) the way the business is run and to produce a competitive advantage then getting the right infrastructure and architecture is essential.
Security and connectivity
The connectivity score was calculated by allocating points for the number of platforms that a product runs on natively, the number of sources that can be read natively, the number of enterprise applications which can be read directly and the support for reading message queues. One of the interesting conclusions is that the BI vendors with a large market share score very well in this category. The highest possible score was 14 points and especially if you only consider the security then many of the vendors have a perfect score. Contrary to expectations, in many cases this causes more problems than it solves, Business Intelligence should be about “Pervasive Information” i.e. making useful information available to anybody who might possibly need it to do their job better not ensuring that every piece of information can be hidden so nobody can see it.
Search and alerting
A relatively small but important category, some products have better facilities than others for searching the metadata for consistency, when BI systems come under criticism a major problem is always the consistency/accuracy of the information and that is usually dependent on the accuracy of the definitions. Alerting is particularly important for people who carry real-time devices like PDA’s and BlackBerrys, it is possible to generate a message automatically from a BI system to notify the user regarding some situation he or she may wish to know about – an order has been received or the inventory is too low.
Totals across all categories
There is some question about how sensible it is to add up the scores for all the categories and produce a total graph since none of the scores have been weighted, the best “total” product is probably not the best product for any given company, which has unique issues. It is however interesting to see how the highest scoring products compare with how successful they are in the marketplace and what sort of companies use them. It is interesting to note that the top 5 products in general have large numbers of users per installation, although none of them have the reputation of being very easy to use they are all excellent (if expensive) products offering a broad range of functionality and performance to a wide range of users.
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