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March 28, 2016

Self-Service Data Prep is the Next Big Thing for BI

Paige Schaefer

The data preparation market is growing at a fast clip—Gartner predicts that the data preparation market will reach $1 billion by 2019, with 30% of organizations adopting some form of self-service data preparation. To better understand this expanding market, Dresner Advisory Services, a research firm led by former Gartner analyst Howard Dresner (who coined the technology term business intelligence), released its second annual end-user data preparation market study. The study covers everything from data preparation usage trends to most-valued features, providing new insights about this cutting-edge space.

In its analysis of data preparation vendors, the Dresner study considered five core capabilities: usability, integration, output, data manipulation, and deployment features. Among the 29 vendors that Dresner evaluated, Trifacta claimed the top ranking for the second year in a row.

The study examined users at a cross-section of companies, both large and small, in a wide variety of industries. Here are a few of the highlights:

  1. More than 64% of respondents constantly or frequently perform end-user data preparation.
    • It’s clear that data preparation is important for the majority of organizations, and will only become more so as the volume and complexity of their data increases.
  1. But, just over 12% claim they are highly effective in performing data preparation.
    • Data preparation is often challenging, with many organizations lacking the technical resources to devote to comprehensive data preparation. Choosing the right self-service data preparation software is an important step.
  1. Usability features, such as the ability to build/execute data transformation scripts without requiring technical expertise or programming skills, were considered “critical” or “very important” features by over 60% of respondents.
    • As big data becomes decentralized and integrated into multiple facets of an organization, users of all abilities need to be able to wrangle data themselves.
    • That’s why we built Trifacta—our intuitive interface empowers users of varying technical abilities to think and operate like a data scientist.
  1. The top two features, the ability to aggregate and group data, and a simple interface for imposing structure on raw data are, at minimum, important to more than 90 percent of respondents.
    • The nature of data is changing. It’s coming to organizations from multiple avenues and in many structures, and will only continue to become more complex.
    • We engineered Trifacta with that in mind, enabling our users to wrangle data of all shapes and sizes.
  1. More than 80 percent of respondents identified the ability to interactively sample data as “critical” or “important” features of end user data preparation products
    • Respondents of the study understand that knowing what’s in your data up front is critical to understanding what to do with it later.
    • With Trifacta, our Hadoop support enables detailed profiling at any scale, so that customers know exactly what kind of data they’re dealing with.
  1. Over 85% of respondents indicated that they integrated data preparation software with existing tools.
    • Respondents agree—data preparation is not a siloed tool. There are many other interlocking pieces to the big data puzzle, of which data preparation is one key component.
    • We specifically chose to build best-of-breed software, allowing our customers the flexibility to choose the remaining components themselves.

You can read the full Dresner Advisory Services report here. To learn more about Trifacta and its approach to data wrangling, you can download the free desktop version today.

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The Results Are In! Unboxing the 2016 Dresner Data Preparation Study

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