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Key Take-Aways From Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant For Business Intelligence And Analytics Platforms

This article is more than 9 years old.

Business Intelligence (BI) platforms grew 9% in 2013, and are projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.7% through 2018.

By 2017, the majority of business users and analysts will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis.

These and other insights are from the  Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms (client access) written by Rita L. Sallam, Bill Hostmann, Kurt Schlegel, Joao Tapadinhas, Josh Parenteau and Thomas W. Oestreich published on February 23, 2015. You can get a complimentary copy of the Magic Quadrant For Business Intelligence And Analytics Platforms, courtesy of Tableau, here. Gartner surveyed 2,083 users of BI platforms as part of the research for this magic quadrant, combining vendor assessments on several key customer metrics.   The Magic Quadrant For Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, along with key take-aways, are shown below.

Key take-aways include the following:

  • Gartner predicts that the market for BI platforms grew 9% in 2013, and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.7% through 2018.  This makes BI platforms one of the fastest growing in all of enterprise software.
  • Gartner found that interest in cloud based business intelligence (BI) declined slightly during 2014, to 42% compared with last year's 45%.  The report mentions that survey respondents reported they either are (28%) or are planning to deploy (14%) BI in some form of private, public or hybrid cloud.  Despite this drop in the percentage of surveyed enterprises planning or actively using cloud BI platforms today, Gartner believes that this category will continue to grow as line of business (LOB) adoption increases over time.
  • Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft , MicroStrategy, Oracle , IBM , Information Builders, SAS and SAP are in the leaders’ quadrant.
  • Birst, Logi Analytics are in the Challengers quadrant, and Alteryx, Tibco Software and Panorama Software are in the Visionaries Quadrant.
  • Niche players include Board International, DataWatch, GoodData. OpenText, Salient Management Company, Targit, Pentaho, Prognoz, Pyramid Analytics and Yellowfin.
  • Gartner predicts that by 2017, most business users and analysts in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis.
  • Through 2016, less than 10% of self-service business intelligence initiatives will be governed sufficiently to prevent inconstancies that adversely affect the business.
  • Gartner is seeing the majority of enterprise customers waiting to see if their enterprise-standard BI platform will deliver on the business-user-oriented capabilities they prefer to use to meet new analytics requirements beyond production reporting.

What This Means For Manufacturers

This latest quadrant underscores how difficult it is to take factory-floor data and translate it into dashboards reporting financial performance. To better serve manufacturers’ needs, business intelligence and analytics vendors need to do the following:

  • Provide manufacturing-based modeling tools and applications that take into account machine- and plant floor level data. What’s needed is more focus on structured, semi-structured and unstructured manufacturing data that can be quickly integrated into analytical models tied to customer-driven performance.  Gaining insights into how trade-offs made on the shop or plant floor impact customer metrics is a must-have.
  • In manufacturing, mobility is the new black. Captive mobile devices and systems have long been a strong contributor to production workflows. It’s time to accentuate the success of these technologies and bring analytics and BI tools to tablets and smartphones on the shop floor. Starting with alerts on supply chain, quality, compliance, nonstandard customer requests including to-order workflows and order status, analytics vendors need to deliver apps that can support these line-of-business (LOB) requirements.
  • Dashboards that deliver manufacturing business value too. Too often the analytics vendors in this report rely on canned dashboards that appeal to as many enterprises as possible by showing the most common metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It’s time for more of these vendors to step up to the challenge of creating dashboards that can flex and scale to the unique needs of manufacturers too.
  • More support for Embedded BI in production, service, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) workflows. Manufacturers fight a daily battle against time-to-market, cost of quality, customer demand and logistics constraints. Gaining insight through embedded analytics into how their most relied-on manufacturing processes can be improved and streamlined is needed.
  • Using cloud-based BI in supply chains to drive greater compliance, quality and improve forecasting accuracy is what many manufacturers are looking for today. Many of the vendors listed in this latest report have the scale to create a cloud-based BI application capable of synchronizing compliance, quality management, forecasting and even vendor managed inventory (VMI), yet few are addressing these needs today.  For analytics and BI platforms to scale and deliver even greater value into manufacturing, the complexities of supply chains needs to be confronted head-on and dealt with.

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