Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

Post date: Feb 22, 2017 7:45:37 PM

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

Source: Gartner (February 2017)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

SAP

SAP delivers a broad range of BI and analytic capabilities for both large IT-managed enterprise reporting deployments and business-user-driven data discovery deployments. Companies often choose SAP as their enterprise BI standard, especially if they also standardize on SAP applications. With the introduction of SAP BusinessObjects Cloud in 2016 (formerly called SAP Cloud for Analytics) SAP now offers two distinct platforms: SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise for on-premises deployments, and SAP BusinessObjects Cloud as a purely cloud-based deployment (built on SAP's Hana cloud platform). SAP's new Digital Boardroom solution is built on the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud platform.

Several of SAP's BI and analytic components were not considered in this Magic Quadrant. (Components, such as Design Studio, Dashboards, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Analysis for Office, are addressed in the Market Guide for traditional enterprise reporting platforms.) This Magic Quadrant is focused on SAP Lumira in combination with the SAP BusinessObjects platform capabilities and the new SAP BusinessObjects Cloud platform.

SAP's position is in the Visionaries quadrant. While SAP's momentum has increased, particularly in its installed base, it still does not have the broad market momentum of the Leaders in this space. Moreover, despite an above-average rating for customer experience, lower scores for operations including product quality and support affected its position regarding Ability to Execute. On the Completeness of Vision axis, SAP's visionary product capabilities lean toward establishing an early position in the emerging smart data discovery segment — likely to be the next wave of disruption in the BI and analytics market. SAP's full spectrum of critical capabilities for a modern BI platform, focus on innovation, improving customer experience, and global presence as a megavendor make it well-positioned to regain a leadership position in the modern BI segment, if its momentum on all fronts continues.

STRENGTHS

• • Complementary to enterprise reporting platforms: SAP has strengthened its position in the modern BI market segment. Among the top three reasons for reference customers to select SAP Lumira or SAP BusinessObjects Cloud were ease of use and user autonomy, respectively. With an average deployment size for its modern components of a little less than 300 users (which is about 25% of the overall average deployment size for this Magic Quadrant), it often complements SOR reporting platforms. SAP's use cases are fairly equally split between the agile centralized BI provisioning, decentralized analytics and governed data discovery use cases. Four out of 10 reference customers did not have SAP as their enterprise standard.

  • Customer perception: SAP's reference customers indicate that their view of its future is positive (with an above-average score). Its solutions are also successfully used within the clients' organizations, as indicated by a score in the top third for success in the organization (a significant improvement over last year). Only a few clients intend to discontinue using SAP (putting it in the top third of vendors for this metric). Both platforms demonstrated growth and increased adoption.

  • Vision: Product roadmap and future vision were among the top five reasons for reference customers selecting SAP, although this was more important for SAP BusinessObjects Cloud than for SAP Lumira. The integrated vision of planning, analytical and predictive capabilities in a unified, single platform — SAP BusinessObjects Cloud — and its product vision toward smart data discovery capabilities is also promising.

  • Digital Boardroom is a differentiator: SAP's Digital Boardroom solution, which is built to be used with large touchscreen displays, has gained a lot of attention. It speaks well to the vision of a data-driven company and is particularly attractive to executives because it includes "what if" analysis and simulations. SAP can leverage its strategic position in a customer base of large enterprises and also protect its installed base against smaller vendors with less access to (and visibility with) senior executives.

CAUTIONS

• • Product quality: Developing two product lines in parallel can be a real challenge, even for an organization of SAP's size. It may therefore come as no surprise that SAP's reference customers expressed their concerns about product quality and performance. The highest percentage of SAP reference customers (compared with the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant) identified software quality as a limitation to wider deployment; it was also placed in the top quartile for poor performance. Absent or weak functionality was the biggest platform problem for SAP's clients. This is an important area that SAP needs to address in order to not stress-test its clients' confidence and to increase its Ability to Execute in the market.

  • Limited interoperability between on-premises and cloud: SAP BusinessObjects Cloud has an appealing and modern design, but currently offers less-mature capabilities than SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. There is a limited degree of interoperability between the two platforms — mostly at the data level and not at the level of analytic applications and artefacts. This means there is no clear migration path to the cloud for on-premises deployments. In addition, the two platforms have different pricing and licensing models, which means that a user wanting to use both platforms for analytics would need two different licenses.

  • Simplification work in progress: Despite the progress SAP has made in pursuing its product simplification strategy, there are still components with overlapping capabilities in the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform (such as SAP BusinessObjects Mobile and the recently acquired Roambi). Consequently, clients may still be confused about which component to use. Clients should validate the product's position in SAP's strategic roadmap for each subsequent investment decision. Particular attention should be paid to evaluating the announced merger of SAP Lumira and SAP Design Studio into one product in the first half of 2017.

  • Support: Similar to last year's results, support quality is an issue for SAP's clients. Reference customer scores for response time and the time it takes to resolve issues put SAP in the bottom quartile (and the lowest position among the megavendors). Even though SAP's user enablement score was in the top quartile, the availability of skilled resources was an issue; it should therefore invest in its large partner base to address this

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