Background of the BI Tool Survey

Since 2003, the consultancy and research firm Passionned has been closely monitoring the market for both BI tools and ETL products. In the past, the focus was on the well-known market leaders who were often regarded as visionaries and leaders. Many organisations used to assume that they had automatically made the right choice if they purchased a tool from one of the market leaders. Since the late nineties, however, the market has changed substantially.

Survey motivation and set-up

The primary reason why we should evaluate BI tools carefully and focus on the BI infrastructure, is because it can ensure that creating reports and business score cards is much easier, enabling the business users to select the information that is relevant to them quickly. In this survey we define BI tools as software that provide functionality for reporting (ad-hoc), interactive analyses (OLAP) and dashboarding in one package.

"The time and effort invested in a proper Business Intelligence System design and the selection of a BI tool, will be paid back many times over”, said Daan van Beek, BI industry expert and founder of Passionned.

Thomas Siebel, the founder of Siebel, (now Oracle) was quoted in an interview: "Organizations may save a lot of money when valuable data stored throughout the organization in seperated silo's can be integrated and combined".

The second reason to evaluate and promote Business Intelligence tools is that many organizations still use spreadsheets to provide information. Whilst spreadsheets provide an excellent mechanism for information delivery they are not and were never intended to be seen as the infrastructure behind Business Intelligence systems. This misuse of an excellent product is probably the single most important reason that Business Intelligence Systems still have a bad reputation, information only has value if it is accurate and timely, generally “information” produced by spreadsheets is neither.

Finally: like many other markets, the business intelligence market appears to be cyclic, with a new generation of products every 10 years or so. If we examine the market at the moment we appear to have reached the end of the old cycle and a new one is just beginning. The existing market leaders, Business Objects (now SAP), Cognos (now IBM), Hyperion (now Oracle), SAS, Microstrategy and Information Builders were established in the 1970’s and 1980’s and have dominated the Business Intelligence (Management Information) markets ever since. Now they are being challenged, both from below by the new, small, flexible, innovative companies that they themselves used to be, and from above by the very large software giants like Microsoft Oracle and SAP, who have always partnered with them in the past and now have decided to compete with them.

How the BI tools Survey is carried out

  • A list of more than 70 criteria was developed as a basis for the comparison, using input from the developer community and focussing on characteristics that play a major role in the quick development of a successful BI infrastructure.

  • Passionned conducted in-depth interviews with all the vendors listed on the 'List of BI tools' page regarding their BI solutions.

  • In addition, vendors were given the opportunity to provide a live, two-hour demonstration in order to present the functionality of their BI tool. PowerPoint presentations were avoided as much as possible. During these demos, Passionned evaluated whether the tool was able to handle particular situations by means of Q&A sessions. Where there was still doubt, Passionned gave the tool either zero or half a point.

  • Vendors were asked to provide list prices for their tools by an official Request for Proposal (RFP), with two configurations (see also the criteria). This gave nothing more than a price indication since many of the products are priced differently and many of the vendors were secretive about pricing.

  • In many cases an intensive dialog took place between Passionned and the vendors to obtain answers to outstanding questions. Ambiguous or misleading answers were not accepted. All answers were confirmed in writing by the suppliers to avoid misunderstandings.

  • Finally, a number of developers from end-user organisations as well as BI consultants provided feedback with regard to the results of the BI study. Whenever the necessary, further investigation took place and the evaluation was altered accordingly.

> List of BI tools studied
> Aspects and criteria explained
> Ranking of the BI tools by aspect 
> Download the BI Tool Survey Report

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