BI giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP grew little in 2013, but nimble, visual-data-discovery leaders Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and QlikTech soared. Here’s why.

The business intelligence market in 2013 could best be described as tepid. As one vendor CEO put it, “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse.” The “better” was the mid-1990s, when BI software sales were growing 40% per year. The “worse” was the peak of the recession in 2008, when BI growth limped along at 2%.

A study vendor revenues and product releases in 2013 reveals a tale of 2 worlds: the giant BI-platform vendors and the nimbler visual-data-discovery vendors. For essentially the mostsome of the most part, large BI vendors showed flat or low-single-digit revenue growth while companies akin to Tableau (75%), TIBCO Spotfire (30%), and QlikTech (23%) have all shown strong, double-digit growth during the first three quarters of 2013. Their secret? Agility.

In the now-normal frenetic pace of economic, users can now not watch for that completely architected, IT-sanctioned reports or carefully modeled business queries. They should mash together new and broader data sources, whether from the cloud, a partner, a supplier, or Twitter.

[ Where is business intelligence headed? Read 2014 BI Outlook: Who’s Hot, Who’s Not. ]

Just consider this year’s holiday shopping bonanza. Hoping to locate that elusive Xbox One or PlayStation 4? The stores with the very best inventory, timeliest customer-service alerts about new deliveries, and best insight into product availability are those so we can earn customer loyalty. Retailers can’t look forward to IT to establish reports about new products. But this trend is not only about retail and for-profit companies. Government agencies, healthcare organizations, and non-profits which are attempting to do more with less are also flocking to easier, more visual, and agile BI tools.

The just-published BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary for 2013 shows that each vendor covered released a brand new or upgraded visual data-discovery module this year. The report also pulls out two new summary scores, one for ease of use and one for cloud-deployment options.

A selection of analyst reports attempt to evaluate ease of use, a difficult assessment to make fairly and consistently. a straightforward list report perhaps easy to create in any tool, but what about exploring more-complex scenarios, corresponding to market-basket analysis? And writing complex SQL could be easy for a well-trained IT coder, but not for an informal business user.

In scoring the vendors, I took into consideration customer survey feedback (to your last chance to offer input and get feedback, click here). I gave heavier weight to hands-on testing of visual-data-discovery, dashboard, and business-query modules. I considered how intuitive it was to finish a role and the way many steps were required of both authors and knowledge consumers.

Not surprisingly, Tableau came out with the best marks for ease of use, some extent on which the corporate differentiates itself. But there have been some scores that surprised me, including those for SAS and MicroStrategy, either one of which had “good” scores for ease of use. Long ago, these vendors weren’t known for straightforward-to-use or visually appealing products. This modification shows just how far the newest releases have come.

Some other key ends up in the newest scorecard:

• Information Builders products improved the foremost, with previously marginal scores for 3 modules rising to “good.”
• Actuate, a brand new addition to our coverage in 2013, had the best marks of any vendor for production reporting. With its acquisition of Quiterian inside the fourth quarter of 2012, now branded Actuate Analytics, this vendor is usually pursuing visual data discovery.
• Cloud BI vendor Birst can be covered for the primary time during this year’s Scorecard, and it earned the top marks inside the cloud category. With Microsoft PowerBI in preview and IBM Cognos Neo slated for beta inside the first quarter, two products with cloud options at the way, and Oracle BI recently offered within the cloud, this category might see numerous movement in 2014.
• SAP way back declared mobile to be a top priority when it acquired Sybase back in 2010, but its mobile functionality was a piece in progress inside the BI space. The company’s lead dashboard product was Flash-based, and SAP made an early bet at the Blackberry Playbook. In 2013 SAP caught up on mobile BI, and one of many four mega-BI vendors — any other three being IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle — SAP is now the sole vendor with “good” scores for mobile capabilities (see the scoring criteria on this free download, registration required).

This year’s report tracks 32 vendors in all, including  noteworthy newcomers Alteryx, Datawatch (which acquired visual discovery vendor Panopticon), Dell (which acquired Quest and Toad BI), cloud vendor Good Data, search and natural-language-processing vendor NeutrinoBI, and large-data-analysis vendor SiSense.

These noteworthy vendors specifically show that despite slowed growth within the mainstream market, BI innovation continues.

Cindi Howson is the founding father of BI Scorecard, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and provides in-depth business intelligence product reviews.

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