The Passionned Group Business Intelligence Tools Survey has existed since 2007, and is a 100% vendor neutral market study and comparison report. Many companies use our extensive research report worldwide to select the best Business Intelligence platform quickly. The January 2015 edition was recently published. “In fact, its not just an update, many parts have been revised and all the latest versions of the different BI tools are examined”, said Passionned Group managing director, Daan van Beek.
Updated solutions
Oracle BI 11g.1
Since 2014 Oracle BI (OBIEE) is also available in the cloud as a service with some pre-defined Analytical applications like HCM Analytics and CRM Analytics. Their pricing seems to be a bit expensive: 250 USD a month per user. Oracle BI Cloud Service is an enterprise-class analytics platform in the cloud. It empowers users and business analysts to turn data into insight quickly. Read more in our survey.
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 SP5
In addition to several enhancements for administrative purposes and minor improvements for the end-user SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 SP5 provides one new great feature: SAP JAM. This is a collaboration and workflow solution, that helps companies to connect their employees, customers or business partners with information, BI applications, and business processes for advanced social networking, in the office or while mobile. Read more in our survey.
Microsoft BI 2014
Microsoft have recently delivered their Mobile BI application, restricted in the first place to Office 365 customers. Now Microsoft offers their Mobile BI offering for both Windows Phones and the iPad. It is clear that this is a market where Microsoft are not yet at their best, scoring a meagre 10 points out of a possible 22 in the Mobile BI-section in our survey.
This mobile app needs to be developed further to become really attractive for more customers. It provides some interactiveness but it looks like the current version is more a viewer for Excel graphs, which are embedded on a mobile platform, than that it supports all the native features of mobile devices. Read more in our survey.
Board 9.0
Board 9.0 provides several big enhancements and new features / modules. In collaboration with the Swiss Research Institute IDSA they have developed predictive capabilities so the user can build specific analytic models for forecasting, clustering and other statistical purposes. The resulting parameters can be easily embedded into analytic, planning and simulation applications.
With their latest version the renewed chart engine provides six additional data visualization features. Their mobile app is also completely redesigned and now capable of data entry mainly for planning and budgeting purpose which is quite unique. BOARD Mobile offers users access to their desktop application and web-based applications on Windows 8 tablets and Apple iPads.
TIBCO JasperSoft 6.0
Jaspersoft have improved considerably in the usability category but still have some work to do to compete with the top products. With their 6.0 release the usability is getting better, finally reaching a minimum level.
StyleIntelligence 12
Since version 12 StyleIntelligence is also available as a native app in the Google Android and Apple store. Compared to version 11.5 nothing else has been changed except for a few bug fixes.
Other tools that has new versions
Cognos has also released a new version (10.2.2), Tableau Software (8.3) and Pentaho (5.2). From the 169 key criteria we examine in our survey nothing has been changed, so they score equal to previous releases. They solved though many bugs in their minor releases.
Comparison matrix can now be easily copied to a spreadsheet
With the new update of our survey the comparison matrix in the appendix of the report (20 pages) can now be easily copied to Excel. Selection of the right BI tool for your organization will then be performed very quickly.
About the Business Intelligence Tools Survey
The intention of this study is to see what the most popular products offer now, in terms of usability, functionality, security, cloud, mobile and add some advice. We do not believe it is possible to hold a beauty contest and choose a winner; the most suitable product for one organization need not be the most suitable for another, depending on number of users, hardware, where the data comes from, volumes of data and type of organisation. Read more in our survey.
The new version of the Business Intelligence Tools Survey is available at this website.