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May 13, 2015

Analytics Leaders Target Speed, Context, Functionality

Among the emerging trends in the data analytics business is the desire for faster access to business insights with improved context along with greater functionality in areas like predictive analytics and cognitive intelligence.

Hence, the latest vendor rankings from market watcher Nucleus Research reveal that leading analytics vendors are pursuing both requirements with a mix of deep analytics architectures and flexible, cloud-based offerings.

The Nucleus Research “value matrix” is among a growing list of vendor rankings that seeks to identify market leaders based on functionality and, in the case of the latest installment of the “analytics value matrix,” “usability.” The matrix also seeks to spot market trends and which companies are succeeding in meeting new analytics requirements.

Heading the Nucleus Research rankings of analytics leaders in the first half of 2015 were Birst, GoodData, SAP and IBM. The value matrix shows that GoodData and IBM are trending towards both greater functionality and usability in the data analytics offerings.

Source: Nucleus Research

San Francisco-based Birst was cited for its “ongoing efforts to provide customers with a usable cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that leverages visualization and data warehousing to contribute to industry-specific capabilities, while broadening its global reach.” The vendor’s tiered data architecture covers both existing data warehouses and applications to “automate data refinement” while a second tier boosts BI functionality, the market researcher said.

Nucleus meanwhile highlighted the general release of IBM Watson Analytics as a key step for the company, whose customers “leverage its analytics capabilities to meet a variety of needs and achieve payback in less than a year.” Watson Analytics was released late last year as a software-as-a-system platform combining natural language query capabilities with predictive and visual data discovery.

The researcher also noted IBM’s embrace of cloud-based applications and services “that will provide extensive analytic functionality.” Among these are its BigInsights for Hadoop offering, which brings machine learning and R analytics capabilities to the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Other market leaders identified in the “leader” rankings included, in rough order, Yellowfin, Microsoft, Microstrategy and Information Builders.

SAS, Jinfonet Software and database giant Oracle headed the “expert” rankings along with Infor and Pentaho, a unit of Hitachi Data Systems. SAS was credited with new analytics investments in integrated visualization and interactive capabilities that would allow it to reach “an audience beyond data scientists.” That could prove an important asset as analytics makes its way into the executive suite.

Meanwhile, Jinfonet was lauded for it support for several big data environments such as NoSQL, MapReduce, MongoDB and Apache Hive, as well as Amazon Web Services. A growing API library along with growing flexibility and usability has resulted in a growing base of OEM customers, Nucleus reported.

Nucleus said Oracle could improve its ranking by “investing in its user interface, which would balance its extensive list of functionality with usability and keep users from being overwhelmed with functionality.”

Among the leaders in the “facilitator” rankings were data visualization specialist Tableau Software, Salesforce Wave, Qlik, Domo and Adaptive Insights.

Meanwhile, Nucleus Research ranked BIME, the cloud BI specialist, and Logi Analytics as “core providers” of analytics value.

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