This page contains a small selection of the BI software selection criteria (103) we have used to compare all the 16 major Business Intelligence Software Solutions that are available in the market. All criteria are explained in more detail in the BI Software Survey which is available for purchase. You may find the criteria useful for the selection of a BI & Reporting Software for your own company or customer.
Infrastructure & architecture
This category, which contains 24 criteria, measures how well a BI software solution 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
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 software solution have native connectors to a wide range of data sources like SQL Server, Oracle, DB/2, MS Analysis Services (OLAP) et cetera.
Core functionality
This category, which contains 28 criteria, examines the core functionality (out-of-the-box) of the Business Intelligence software solution. 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.
Performance management & planning
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? About fifty percent of the Business Intelligence & reporting software doesn’t have functionality for performance management and planning.
Predictive Analysis
This category, which contains 6 criteria, examines if and how data and text mining is supported and to what degree. Data mining is widely used to be able to predict behaviour of customers, vendors, webvisitors, employees and so forth. Text mining is generally used to classify Word documents, Twitter messages, webpages, unstructured text, competitor information and other social media profiles.
Usability & visualization
This category, which contains 8 significant criteria, measures the usability of the Business Intelligence software solution. 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.
Performance issues
In this category, 7 criteria are used to measure how well the BI software solution supports techniques to optimize report and dashboard performance. A good response time is really important for the User eXperience (UX) because business users and especially higher management has not much time. Some criteria which are used to evaluate the products are: aggregate awareness, OLAP, MOLAP, ROLAP, reuse of the cache and so forth.
Search & alerting
This category covers 4 criteria about search on data and meta data and it includes also criteria to evaluate the alerting & notification functionality.
Costs & pricing*
This category covers all kind of costs related to buying and having a BI software solution. In the BI Software 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 Software 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.
General information
This category provides general information about the vendor and the Business Intelligence software solution 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 Software Survey 2012. If you need this information, please feel free to contact us.
