The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

Recently, Forrester published the report The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008, written by Boris Evelson. You can get a free copy courtesy of SAS.

This report is an evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, and according it, Forrester conducted lab-based evaluations in March 2008 and interviewed 12 vendors and 24 user companies, including Actuate, IBM Cognos,Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software, QlikTech, SAP, SAS Institute, and TIBCO Spotfire.

The report considers that Business Intelligence is not just for reporting anymore, and now expand into the following eight major BI product functionalities:
- Production/operational reporting for pixel-perfect mass report distribution
- Ad hoc query tools provide a quick answer to a business question
- OLAP tools, when business questions are more about “whys” than “whats”
- Dashboards as an interactive, visual UI — not a reporting or analytical tool by itself
- BAM to report on real-time data and process information streams
- Predictive modeling answers questions about what’s likely to happen next
- BI workspaces enable true end user self-service
- Guided BI search tools support free form ad hoc queries and analysis

The report also considers the Evaluation Criteria are Current Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence and the Evaluated Vendors Must Meet Architecture, Functionality, and Scalability Criteria. IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy.

About the leaders: most large enterprise BI vendors finally “get it” and offer robust, scalable, well-integrated BI platforms with rich and broad BI functionality, and highlighted:
- Business Objects, an SAP company, provides some of the best-in-class tools for each use case
- IBM Cognos provides one of the most modern and scalable BI environments
- SAS is the best one-stop BI shop that includes high-end analytics from a single vendor
- Oracle brings the best of its rich BI portfolio into Enterprise Edition Plus

Forrester always writes interesting reports. This report is a good way to the companies get an overview about the main features of the main BI platforms.