According to SAP, an Independent research firm Forrester Research Inc named SAP as a leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) platforms in the October 2010 report – “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010″. SAP was named as a leader and ranked with the strongest market presence among 11 other vendors. Here is the excerpt of the report:
In Forrester’s 145-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders , SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders offering equal — or in some cases superior — BI functionality, but it mostly relies on partners for the rest of its information management capabilities. TIBCO Spotfire also came out as a Strong Performer offering top choices for analytics, even surpassing other Strong Performers in the overall information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application integration. Last but not least, QlikTech and Panorama Software moved up from Contenders and into the Strong Performers category based on the continuous improvements in their analytical capabilities.
According to SAP press release, Forrester Research evaluated SAP® BusinessObjects™ solutions using 145 different criteria that were grouped into the following three categories:current offering, strategy and market presence. On a scale of zero to five, the market presence of SAP earned a 4.81, the highest score for market presence achieved by companies evaluated in the report. This year, SAP’s scores are up across all three categories (current offering, strategy and market presence). However SAP didn’t provide the scores for categories: current offering and strategy. Press release also provides some comments from the report about why SAP is a market leader in enterprise BI platforms:
- “SAP BusinessObjects continues to steamroll with innovative products like [SAP BusinessObjects] Explorer and in-memory analytical appliance – [SAP NetWeaver] Business Warehouse Accelerator.”
- “When you’re looking for the top report writer, look no further than [SAP] Crystal [Reports], which is probably OEMed and embedded in more applications than any other commercial BI tool.”
- “Xcelsius remains popular with many executives because they can take the self-contained Flash files, which combine dashboard application and data, on the road and use it on laptops in a disconnected mode – even without SAP software installed on that machine.”
- “And last but not least, [SAP NetWeaver] Business Warehouse Accelerator appliance combines the flexibility of columnar and inverted index databases with the speed of in-memory database to provide a unique and powerful DBMS optimized for BI.”
- “Additionally, SAP leads the large vendor pack in self-service BI SaaS offerings.”
