Gartner’s highly regarded Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence is based on Gartner’s detailed customer surveys, interviews and analysis. On 29 January, Gartner has released 2010 report. Here are some highlights from this report.
Economic conditions are driving interest in low-cost alternatives. BI spending remained firm in 2009 as organizations turned to BI to survive the worst downturn in modern history. While projects to improve decision making, identify operating efficiencies and risk, and attract new customers more cost-effectively continued, the need to do more with less — more quickly — increased interest in lower-cost options.
Microsoft’s lower pricing, bundled packaging and focus on “information worker” productivity make it an attractive proposition for organizations that want to make BI capabilities more pervasive across a wider range of users. Use of OLAP functionality, by Microsoft customers, is double that for the rest of the survey respondents. Ad hoc analysis capabilities for analysts and business users are expected to be further improved with the introduction of Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel.
Gartner forecasts that “the market for BI platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets despite the economic downturn.” “In tough economic times, when competitiveness depends on the optimization of strategy and execution, organizations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business.” According to Gartner’s annual survey of CIO technology priorities, BI remained among the top five priorities in 2009 (and it was No. 1 in each of the previous four years).
Gartner’s user surveys show that improved decision making is the key driver of BI purchases. The volume of information generated from enterprise applications is at a high. It will continue to increase. This data combined with unstructured data, which represents the majority of corporate data sources, must be available for analysis and decision making. BI platforms and BI applications will evolve to analyze this vast and increasing amount of diverse data to optimize business decisions.
BI platforms enable users to build applications that help organizations learn, understand and optimize their business. Gartner defines a BI platform as a software platform that delivers the 13 capabilities listed below.
Integration:
- BI infrastructure
- Metadata management
- Development tools
- Collaboration
Information delivery:
- Reporting
- Dashboards
- Ad hoc query
- Microsoft Office integration
- Search-based BI
Analysis:
- OLAP
- Interactive visualization
- Predictive modeling and data mining
- Scorecards
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