Nine Business Intelligence Vendors to Watch
Massive consolidation in 2007 changed everything in the business intelligence market. Who's still standing and who's right for your enterprise? Here's a look at the leading BI vendors' strengths, weaknesses and strategies for the future.
That girth, however, could have a downside for SAP's and Business Object's customers. The acquisition, Gartner analysts write, could have an impact on SAP's "ability to execute, because of the inevitable uncertainty this creates for its customers with respect to the future of SAP's internally developed BI products and its ability to deliver any promised integration."
According to the latest Gartner customer reference survey, SAP has some work to do in ensuring smoother implementations with its SAP BI tools. "SAP's reference customers, the majority of whom reported that they're running the latest version of SAP BI, ranked it as significantly less functional and harder to implement than the references provided by all the other vendors," states the report.
SAS
The Gartner report couldn't be clearer about SAS's market position: "SAS dominates in advanced analytic solutions," states the report. "No other vendor in the [Gartner's] Magic Quadrant has its range of capabilities or can point to the same number of advanced analytic deployments." The report goes on to mention SAS's strong packaged analytic application programs, "with solutions that go well beyond reporting and key performance indicator (KPI)-centric deployments, to include more advanced analytic applications applied to particular business problems such as fraud detection."
And as long as it chooses to remain independent and privately held, the Forrester report concludes, SAS Institute will exert significant influence as the largest BI pure play.
However, there are some issues that SAS needs to watch out for. Most notably, SAS "has a reputation for being very hard to use," states the Gartner report. "In particular, many of the data manipulation and advanced analysis tasks require the SAS programming language; this is an advantage to people with those skills, but a significant barrier to those organizations without them."
(For more on CIO's special BI series, see Part 1 "BI: A Technology Category in Tumult"; Part 3 "BI and On-Demand: The Perfect Marriage?"; Part 4 "What You Need to Know About BI TCO"; and Part 5 "Opinion: Don't Make BI Suck for Users.")
