Click on the links below to see which graphs and scores are available in the BI Survey. The names of the BI software solutions are on this webpage have been replaced with a generic name. In the actual BI Software Survey, giving you the real insight in any way, we have of course used the actual names of the products.
- Infrastructure and architecture
- BI Software Functionality
- Usabiliity and visualization
- Search and alerting
- Performance issues
- Predictive analysis
- Performance management and planning
- Security and connectivity
- Platform support
- Totals across all categories
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.
BI Software Functionality
In the graph below, the BI software solutions 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 29.
Usability and visualization
A maximum of thirteen points awarded to the BI software solution 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 BI software offering various options and features, and making them easy enough for everyone to use. A number of BI software solutions 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 software to be used by highly trained IT professionals this may less relevant.
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.
Performance issues
The performance issues score was calculated by allocating points for aggregate awareness, cubes, caching and proper maintenance of the cache. The maximum number of points awarded in this section was 9.
Predictive analysis
The predictive analysis score was calculated by allocating points for out-of-the-box support for data mining models, data mining applications and text-mining. The maximum number of points awarded in this section was 7.
Performance management and planning
The Performance Management score was calculated by allocating points for direct support for performance management models like Balanced scorecard, EFQM et cetera, support for strategy maps, norms, targets, planning facilities and so on. The maximum number of points awarded in this section was 15.
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 17 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.
Platforms supported
In this category we have also looked at both platform support and support for portals. Whilst we don’t allocate a large number of points to either (a maximum of 3) it is important that the platform and portal which you wish to use are supported. To avoid complexity we have only looked at the major platforms, all the various versions of Windows have been counted together, as have all the various Linux versions, we have looked at the three major Unix versions AIX (IBM), Solaris (Sun) and HP/UX (HP), in addition we looked at the native operating systems from IBM on both their AS400 (iSeries) machines and their S/390 Z series mainframes. This lead to some interesting discussions with the vendors, most of whom claim that they have never been asked to run on platforms that they don’t support, interestingly enough a number of customer organisations who are running large numbers of Business Intelligence users (thousands of concurrent users) have chosen to do that on the mainframe, not because it is the only option – it isn’t, but because they happened to have the capacity available. In this case it would be both inconvenient and costly to choose a product that doesn’t run natively on the mainframe – and most of them don’t. Since the platform issue is considered to be one of the most important selection criteria for many companies we have now included a graph showing which products run on which platforms.
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.
