BARC Score Business Intelligence: Enterprise-Wide BI Platform Deployments
Overview
The market for BI tools is highly competitive, with some large international incumbents, many successful vendors with a track record spanning decades, and countless smaller specialists that approach BI challenges from a niche perspective. This report analyzes the strengths and challenges of all of the leading vendors in the business intelligence market as well as many smaller vendors that often have less visibility, but equally offer outstanding value to their customers.
Business intelligence initiatives always include more than just the front end tools. The technical architecture also includes data warehouses and data marts, data integration and data quality components, dictionaries, repositories, and many other technologies. More importantly, organizations should have a proper BI strategy that goes well beyond an architecture blueprint to include non-technical requirements, alignment with the corporate strategy, organizational models, outcome-based priority settings, and a proper roadmap.
Still, when it comes to kicking off or expanding a business intelligence program, the initial focus lies almost always on the required toolsets. While this may not be the ideal starting point, at some stage a platform or product decision has to be made. This document will help with the selection process by evaluating the most commonly used product sets from the major vendor community.