Analyst report: Use of business intelligence does not match the hype

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, a software industry analyst firm based in Germany.

By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff February 25, 2008

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.”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: https://www.bi-survey.com/