SAS Institute and IBM are business intelligence leaders, says Ovum

Surya Mukherjee, senior analyst at Ovum, makes the point that manufacturers are challenged by a huge increase in business data and ever-shortening timeframes in which to analyse it. And that's with limited resources and increasing regulatory scrutiny. "To keep delivering even the same level of insights as a decade ago, BI vendors and their solutions need to be more agile and adaptive than ever," c comments Mukherjee. "Agility must go beyond simply making existing BI infrastructures run faster. It must also encompass elements of self-service, mobility and collaboration," he adds. Mukherjee says that, following major consolidated in the business intelligence vendor community, the major vendors now offer mature portfolios of software built through years of acquisitions and integrations. As a result, most vendors claim to offer similar core BI functionality, with most having also jumped on bandwagons around Big Data, Fast Data, and mobile BI. For buyers and users, that means difficult choices. And hence the decision matrix, which, says Mukherjee, attempts to help shorten the process of evaluation by providing assessments of the eight top players – IBM, Qliktech, Pentaho, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Microstrategy, and SAS.