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June 1, 2017

Smaller BI Vendors Dominate Rankings

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Smaller, agile analytics vendors rank highest in terms of customer satisfaction and market credibility, according to a new study of the business intelligence market.

The survey released by market researcher Dresner Advisory Services also predicts an uptick in BI spending and examines the so far modest impact of chief data and analytics officers.

The survey ranked a batch of smaller vendors well ahead of established players such as IBM (NYSE: IBM), MicroStrategy NASDAQ: MSTR), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and SAP (NYSE: SAP). Overall BI market leaders, according to the survey, included Domo, Sisense, Pyramid Analytics and Zoomdata.

Top BI technology vendors included RapidMiner, Qlik, Tableau (NYSE: DATA) Quest and GoodData. Information Builders and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) were the only larger companies to make the list of “overall experience leaders” in the Dresner rankings released on Wednesday (May 31).

Dresner said its “vendor credibility model” was based on customer attitudes toward the 26 vendors included in the survey. The model took into account factors such as product quality, technical support and the reliability of its technology as well as how well it scaled.

Newcomer Domo ranked as an overall BI market leader in terms of customer experience and vendor credibility. “It is best in class for product robustness, reliability of technology, scalability, integration of components within product, integration with third-party technologies, overall usability, ease of upgrade/migration to new versions, and has a perfect recommend score,” Dresner reported.

Among larger companies, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) ranked highest in terms of BI vendor credibility but “well below” in other metrics. This was the first year Google was included in the BI market survey, Dresner noted.

Among larger vendors, Information Builders and Salesforce were singled out for significant improvements in the their BI offerings across all survey metrics such as understanding customer’s analytics requirements as well as technology reliability and scaling.

Dresner’s eighth annual “Wisdom of the Crowds” survey is based on 33 criteria used to gauge vendor performance and customer satisfaction. The survey also identifies new BI vendors.

This year’s survey also took into account emerging technologies such as natural language and video analytics along with a new focus on the impact of chief data officers and chief analytics officers. So far, less than 16 percent of companies surveyed have appointed data or analytics chiefs. Most report to CEOs, “but this does not ensure success,” the report noted.

Among Dresner’s key findings is that business operations such as human resources increasingly drive BI. Ultimately, however, “better decision making” was the top objective of business intelligence users, outpacing considerations such as revenue and beating the competition.

The survey also found that customers are using on average at least four BI tools, “reversing a consolidation trend,” the market analyst concluded. That trend “is possibly due to lighter BI architectures,” it added.

Half of the organizations surveyed said they plan to increase investments in BI technologies while only 5 percent said they were cutting reducing spending from 2016 levels.

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