Analyst report: Use of business intelligence does not match the hype
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/25/2008 5:03:00 PM
The manner in which companies are using business intelligence (BI) technology does not exactly match the picture painted by vendors and other industry experts. That’s the conclusion from a survey of more than 1,900 BI users and consultants conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC), a software industry analyst firm based in Germany.
Nigel Pendse, lead author of BARC’s BI Survey 7—a document based on the 1,900 plus interviews—says, “We regularly find that the received wisdom in this industry doesn't match what the majority of real-world users are finding. For instance, almost all demos now focus on the web version of the product. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that web BI usage is universal, but this simply isn't the case - a surprisingly large proportion of people are still using client-server or stand-alone architectures.
"Similarly, people are constantly told that data volumes are exploding," he continued. "But our findings don't support this. BI applications, on the whole, aren't very large and are not getting bigger."
The biggest BI-related myth of all, according to Pendse, is that larger, more expensive solutions deliver greater business value. “We have found that some of the big-name vendors and the most expensive products are not delivering the same business benefits or level of support achieved by some of their lesser-known counterparts,” Pendse concludes. ”There are smaller vendors out there producing cheaper and all-round better solutions than some industry giants," Pendse concluded.
In addition to dispelling myths about BI usage, the BI Survey 7 also compares 16 market-leading products from vendors such as Microsoft, Microstrategy, Business Objects, and Cognos. For more information on the survey, visit: http://www.bi-survey.com/
