Document O81 RESEARCH NOTE May 2014 TECHNOLOGY VALUE MATRIX FIRST HALF 2014 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS THE BOTTOM LINE The evolution of business intelligence is quickly leading to a splintering of markets as the previously monolithic world of BI is now a varied world of analytic applications, data discovery and visualization products, cloud-based and as-a-service business intelligence tools, and traditional BI platforms that pursue best-of-breed status in all of these areas simultaneously. In this fractured market, BI value propositions have become increasingly granular, which has forced vendors to focus on line-of-business support and ease of use concerns that are important to a specific audience to demonstrate value. This Value Matrix evaluates current vendors’ ability to deliver value based on usability and functionality and projects 6-month trends for each vendor. The Business Intelligence Value Matrix focuses on platforms and products that provide value in the key areas of business intelligence: enterprise-class scale and availability for data, transformation of raw data into analytic-ready queries and semantic categorization, data discovery and analysis tools, delivery and sharing of analytic outcomes through reports and visualizations, and embedding BI functionality into new applications. As BI vendors look to improve their capabilities in 2014, they have found that specialization is increasingly important. Over the past year, key trends in the market include: . Data discovery is becoming a necessary part of the BI value proposition. Companies such as Qlik and Tableau have continued to raise the expectations for end users seeking direct interaction with data. The demand for these capabilities has shifted data discovery from an interesting capability to a core business intelligence necessity. Collaboration is now an expected feature of business intelligence. Increasingly vendors that offer collaboration capabilities are driving the list of requirements that organizations are now using to evaluate their implementations. Users are listing this capability as a necessary part of their business intelligence solution, as it allows greater sharing of insights, and helps organizations improve productivity and business processes. Unified business definitions are even more important. Many organizations face a growing data complexity challenge. With increasing data volumes, and the vendors continue to make incorporating external data sources into solutions easier for end Nucleus Research Inc. NucleusResearch.com 100 State Street Phone: +1 617.720.2000 Boston, MA 02109 May 2014 Document O81 users, the need to have a common business view or definition of the data is becoming a necessity. The importance of having everyone seeing the same business definition and speaking the same data definition drives productivity, trust in the data and adoption rates. BI continues to move to the cloud. The advantages of moving BI to the cloud are far greater than simply reducing on-premise server costs. From a processing perspective, cloud BI allows companies to quickly add or remove processing resources as necessary. For data, cloud allows BI solutions to store large amounts of data on an ad-hoc basis. And with the emergence of Amazon as a key battlefield for business intelligence market share, vendors are experimenting with their business models (Nucleus Research n18, Amazon is the new battleground for analytics and data management, February 2013). Traditional pricing models are losing ground with customers looking to reduce costs. Many are choosing utility based costing and subscription models over user based or role based licensing to enable both internal and external users. The ubiquitous nature of mobile BI. Over the past 6 months, mobile has become a ‘must have’ versus a ‘nice to have’. Vendors are extending their mobile BI capabilities to match those of the desktop environment. The key capabilities for advanced mobile BI that will increase value are to ease the effort of creating mobile applications and to provide direct mobile interaction with data that is both easy and accurate. As devices become increasingly ubiquitous and technologically capable, so does the users’ expectations of their applications. They are no longer satisfied with different or limited capabilities and experiences in unique interfaces. The big money in Big Data. Business intelligence and performance management solutions have been raking in the money over the past 6 months as investors see a unique market opportunity to grab market share in today’s diverse business intelligence market. These investments will be used to meet the exponentially increasing interest in BI with new tools that meet end user needs on a global basis. Organizations are seeing the value in big data, and are expecting solutions will support those data environments. © 2014 Nucleus Research, Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Nucleus Research is the leading provider of value-focused technology research and advice. Page 2 NucleusResearch.com May 2014 Document O81 ANALYTICS VALUE MATRIX 1H2014 Facilitator Leader Birs t Y ellowfin M ic rosoft IBM Q lik MicroStrategy A daptive Insights Information Builders T ableau GoodData T ibc o Board SAP Jas persoft SAS Usability I nfor O rac le P entaho A c tuate Logi Analytics Core Provider Expert Functionality The Analytics landscape continues to be fragmented into multiple micro-markets based on the value propositions that companies desire. High performance business intelligence suites, and data discovery products provide their own value propositions based on the needs of the end user organizations. With this fragmentation, it is more important than ever to use the Value Matrix in terms of organizational need for functionality and usability rather than a simple vendor placement. Nucleus expects those investing in usability and dark cockpit-driven design principles will continue to advance in future matrices and will also gain market share away from those whose applications are more complex and costly to learn and support. LEADERS BI Leaders are defined by their ability to combine key BI functionalities that provide value with high levels of usability. The challenge for these vendors is to continue improving in both directions without being outflanked by their Expert and Facilitator counterparts Leaders include Birst, GoodData, IBM, Information Builders, MicroStrategy Microsoft, SAP, and SAS. BIRST Birst, a leader in the Value Matrices for the last two years, and maintains its position. Birst continues to be a leading cloud BI vendor, linking cloud BI, visualization, and data warehousing into a unique value proposition. The investments in an end-to-end data © 2014 Nucleus Research, Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Nucleus Research is the leading provider of value-focused technology research and advice. Page 3 NucleusResearch.com May 2014 Document O81 warehouse in Birst’s own cloud or with Amazon Web Services continue to have a disruptive effect in the market. Nucleus found that Birst’s integration of Amazon Redshift into an integrated analytics solution provided companies with an accelerated route to achieving analytics ROI (Nucleus Research n23 – Birst provides the one-stop shop for Amazon Redshift and analytics, February, 2013). High levels of customer service, data management capabilities, and total cost of ownership continue to serve as top differentiators for Birst when compared to its competitors, and have been key factors in customers’ buying decisions. Many customers, when faced with the costs of an on-premises data warehouse, seek out cloud BI vendors such as Birst, for a lower cost investment. In the past 12 months, Birst has shown an increase in partner activity, with increased efforts to build solutions for customers in CRM, Analytics, and assist with implementations, and industries such as technology, health and pharmaceuticals, financial services, manufacturing and insurance. In December 2013, Birst released Birst Visualizer, a business-oriented, visual discovery tool that is hooked into the Birst logical layer, providing business logic to visualizations (Nucleus Research, n192 – Birst releases Birst Visualizer, December 2013). Users access the same data as the rest of the organization, thereby making sharing, collaboration and analysis more consistent, faster and reliable. With easy to use, self-serve access to business data, casual business users will be able to make data-based business decisions, as a result of their own investigations. These capabilities, initially targeted at existing customers, are now available to all customers as part of the Birst Discovery and Birst Enterprise at no additional charge. Birst continues to focus on enabling the end users with easy to use, intuitive, cloud-based business intelligence software, maintaining business logic integration, and deployment flexibility, which are constant themes for many organizations. Birst is looking to support more cloud and on premise application sources, beyond the connectors already available to Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Marketo, Google Analytics, Oracle, SAP and others. Moving forward, Birst should look to increasing the number of mobile devices supported, as more organizations are seeking data visualization and discovery for their business intelligence implementations. GOODDATA GoodData has established itself as a leading cloud BI vendor. In an analysis of GoodData customers,