Dresner Picks the Top BI Company in 2015 Cloud BI Study

Dresner Advisory Services recently published their 2015 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study. Dresner began conducting the survey in 2012, and Birst has been awarded the top spot each year. Birst even took to bragging on their own homepage with the quote “The Crowds have spoken—and they’re repeating themselves.” Rounding out the top 5 vendors were GoodData, Adaptive Insights, Information Builders, and MicroStrategy.

Dresner bases its vendor ratings on a variety of factors, including: cloud BI features, cloud architecture, cloud security, and web data connectors as reported by suppliers and weighted by user priority of capabilities. The report is not simply a vendor information survey, it is a comprehensive look at the cloud BI space as a whole, from the perspective of both the solutions providers and the consumer.

Summary of findings:

• The number-one barrier to cloud BI adoption is security
• Overall, cloud BI is of mid-tier importance to prospective organizations; 2015 saw interest drop slightly
• Sales and marketing teams are the biggest users of cloud BI solutions, and seek in-memory support, data blending, and self-service
• More than half of those polled either already use cloud BI or plan to in the near term
• Organizations that consider themselves successful at BI are more likely to use cloud solutions
• Private cloud BI models are much more sought after than public ones
• Organizations have functionality, self-service, dashboards, and visualization at the top of their wish lists
• Despite a small decrease in interest, cloud BI is still regarded as important in the industry, and support for such solutions has increased, signaling a positive indication of future adoption
• The top requested data connectors are for Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Facebook
• The most important architectural features for cloud BI in 2015 support conventional needs, such as connectors to on-premise applications and relational database support

Although “cloud” is a popular buzzword in the business intelligence space, many are weary of its perceived limitations. To many cloud solutions providers, this is a reflection of control of assets not under direct administration or not on-premise. However, events have shown many proprietary failings in data security also occur. Security does continue to be the number on issue as to why many medium-sized organizations are sticking with their on-premise business intelligence solution. Very large and very small organizations have made the leap to cloud BI, however.

Increased industry support for high-priority features is something we will see much more of in 2015, according to the study. These features include data integration, interactive analysis, big data support and collaborative business intelligence. However, attention to embedded BI, search interfaces and location intelligence have taken hits in popularity. “Storytelling”, a new feature category fared well in polling, so it will be interesting to see how that develops over the next year.

IT departments seem to care less about many of the relevant cloud BI categories than do rank-and-file business people. Conversely, those who are most successful in gaining insights via cloud BI are more likely to expand their use of the concept, but interestingly, those who don’t see their BI deployments as successful are the most likely to use cloud BI in the future.

Click here to download the full 83-page report.

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