The latest ETR Observatory report on Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools is now available! Backed exclusively by ETR's new Market Array data, the vendors covered in this report are positioned in Leading, Advancing, Tracking, or Trailing vectors according to Momentum and Presence in the market. The plotting of the vendors in the subsector is based exclusively on the data, not opinions or vendor influence.
Beyond product-level spending intentions, the full ETR Markey Array data for B.I. and Reporting Tools also tracks key competitive intelligence such as usage expansion, ROI, Stickiness vs. Churn, Vendor Strengths, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and much more. The syndicated Market Array data is a new debut product for ETR and is only available to subscribers; reach out to our service team at service@etr.ai to access the full data set.
Modern self-service BI platforms provide user-friendly interfaces, often with low-code drag-and-drop functionality. Importantly, though, modern platforms also feature data governance capabilities, security and role management functions, native integrations and data connectors, large libraries of data visualization types, and painless management of development-testing-production phases. Today, these tools have substantial artificial intelligence (AI) built in, providing a bridge from run-of-the-mill BI to more advanced analytics, data science, and machine learning capabilities. This includes easy integration with languages like Python and R, as well as natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI capabilities to help users explore data and explain data visualizations with simple chat boxes or voice commands.
By now, many organizations find themselves supporting several tools with overlapping capabilities. The cost and complexity of supporting redundant tools weighs heavily, especially in times of IT budget cuts, leading many organizations to undergo BI tool rationalization processes to trim their portfolio. Complete, self-service BI platforms are likely to survive the cull. Vendors such as Microsoft Power BI, Salesforce’s Tableau, Oracle Analytics Cloud, Google Looker Studio, SAP Analytics Cloud, and Amazon QuickSight offer a wide array of governance features, native data connectors, visualization types, and cloud-native infrastructure that make them prime to capture market share in a self-service BI world. But self-service BI platforms cannot do everything, and most organizations still have traditional reporting needs that remain stubbornly on-premises, tailored to nuanced compliance requirements, or too difficult to rebuild elsewhere. As such, legacy tools like Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Oracle Analytics Server, and QlikView remain present in many tech stacks. Tools like ThoughtSpot and Tellius were early movers in augmented analytics, using AI and NLP to enable easy business user interactions, but complete platform vendors like Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense have all integrated similar capabilities into their core products by now. Finally, a handful of vendors continue to hold on to reputations of strength in particular use cases. These include GoodData, known for embedded and white label BI use cases; Domo, a tool embraced by and well-suited to marketing departments; and SAS Viya, with a data scientist-friendly advanced analytics suite of tools.
Conclusion: Complete Self-Service BI Platforms the New Normal
The two vendors in the Leading vector for this Observatory, Power BI and Tableau, have similar core functionality but differing appeal to customers. Tableau is seen as a high-end visualization platform bolstered by data management and governance controls and poised for growth after its acquisition by Salesforce four years ago. Power BI, on the other hand, is the lower cost option, conveniently included in Microsoft enterprise licenses that are rather ubiquitous in the business landscape. Power BI has closed the gap in functionality with Tableau and in some ways offers more sophisticated approaches to governance and administration that integrate well with diverse hybrid, multicloud, and multi-vendor tech stacks. Tableau suffers from its high price tag, and the cost is difficult for some organizations to justify in light of overlapping functionality with many other self-service BI platforms. Other major self-service BI platforms, such as Oracle Analytics Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, Looker, and Amazon QuickSight occupy the Advancing vector, while others like Qlik Sense and MicroStrategy linger high in the Trailing vector.
Organizations, as much as they may desire a consolidated BI tool environment, tend to resolve themselves to maintaining legacy on-premises reporting tools like SSRS in the Tracking vector, Oracle Analytics Server in the Advancing vector, and QlikView in the Trailing vector. The forces keeping these legacy tools sticky in organizations’ tech stacks are difficult to rebut, with thorny regulatory compliance requirements keeping pixel-perfect paginated reports relevant and major cloud-native BI platforms remaining resistant to engineering elegant on-premises data connectivity solutions.
On trend with the rest of the enterprise IT landscape, AI has made its presence known in the BI tool market. Vendors like ThoughtSpot in the Advancing vector and Tellius in the Trailing vector made a splash about a decade ago with NLP and search-based analytics, democratizing self-service BI even further into the hands of the least tech-savvy business users. Major platforms like Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense were close on their heels, though, and continue to innovate better user experiences powered by AI. Recent developments in generative AI may further raise the profile of these NLP approaches to BI and accelerate their adoption in organizations, an effect that remains to be seen in the coming years.
And finally, some smaller vendors in the Trailing vector have maintained a foothold in their particular niche areas of strength even as they have expanded their capabilities to try and rival the major self-service BI platforms. Vendors like GoodData continue to be known for excellence in embedded and white label analytics, Domo is still favored by many marketing teams, SAS Viya finds its appeal among more tech-savvy analysts and data scientists, and Sigma Computing continues to market its web-based spreadsheet interface to business users more comfortable in cells and formulas.
The future of the BI and reporting tool market is likely one of stabilization. Full-function self-service BI platforms are increasingly aligned with one or more major cloud provider, emphasizing easy connectivity to important data sources while continually improving the business user experience with better UI and AI functionality.
The above is only a brief synopsis. The full report is a more comprehensive analysis on Business Intelligence and Reporting tools and includes the following vendors: Amazon (QuickSight) | Domo | GoodData | Google (Looker) | IBM (Cognos Analytics) | Microsoft (Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services) | MicroStrategy | Oracle (Analytics Cloud, Analytics Server) | Qlik Technologies (Qlik Sense, QlikView) | Salesforce (Tableau) | SAP (Analytics Cloud) | SAS (Viya) | Sigma Computing | Sisense | Tellius | ThoughtSpot | TIBCO (Spotfire)
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