THE SURVEY: OVER 2000 BI AND PM USERS ACROSS 90 COUNTRIES
The largest independent survey for Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) products worldwide was conducted across 90 countries and analyses data from 2,170 BI and PM users. In total, multiple responses from users of over 30 products have been received. Twenty-three products generated enough responses to enable the BARC analysts to carry out detailed and comparative analyses of these market leaders. The results of The BI Survey 9 place BOARD ahead of established brands such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft and MicroStrategy in many key areas for what is now the fifth time in a row.

BOARD ranked #1

Business Benefit Index (BBI)

Achieving business benefits is, after all, the whole purpose of any BI deployment, so it makes sense to compare deployments based on how well they have performed. The BBI is possibly the most important KPI of all, as it focuses on the bottom line benefits of BI projects, rather than individual technical aspects. The BBI is a combined weighted score based on the following benefits:

• Better business decisions through more thorough or timely analysis
• Faster or more accurate reporting
• Increased revenues through better sales and marketing analysis
• Improved customer satisfaction through enhanced product quality and/or service levels
• Saved headcount in business departments
• Saved headcount in IS
• Reduced external IT costs
• Saved other non-IT costs
• Other

BOARD users have experienced the most benefits thanks to BOARD (see figure).

Administration effort

The next figure shows how many business functions are administered by each product administrator on average. The more business functions per administrator, the longer the bar. It is noticeable that BOARD is very widely deployed with relatively low administrative costs. This is possible thanks to the easy and programming free handling of the BOARD toolkit.

BOARD ranked in the top 5

Business achievement KPIs

This is based on a combination of the BBI and goal achievement KPIs. It measures how well the product delivers business value and helps organizations meet their goals. This figure shows that BOARD is ranked as the 2nd best solution.

Product support quality

Related to product reliability is support quality: if a product is unreliable, or just hard to use, product support is called into action. This has always been an area where there are big differences between vendor performances. Today, after numerous acquisitions and merges on the BI and PM market, product support is one of the most important issues for users. It's good to know that BOARD has always focused on high quality support and strong customer involvement regarding further product development. This has been proven by the good results BOARD has achieved in this category, not only this year but since its first inclusion in the BI Survey.

Competitive win rate

When deciding which products to evaluate, it is useful to know which have fared well in other organizations' product selections. This is an easy way to minimize research efforts and quickly eliminate the ‘losers'. BOARD is among the top five products regarding win rates. Therefore, it makes sense to include BOARD in evaluation processes (see figure).

Intention to buy more licenses

No one knows more about how a product performs in the real world than the customers already using it. All too oft en, they find that products do not live up to expectations, or that the vendor does not support the product properly. Such customers will probably end up using only a minimal amount of the licenses they have already bought, and certainly won't be buying any more. So it is a very positive sign if existing customers say they expect to purchase more licenses - as BOARD customers do (BOARD is among the top 5).

Most important findings about BOARD at a glance:

BOARD ranked top:

• Business Benefit Index
• (Number of) applications per admin
• Business functions per admin

BOARD ranked in the top 5:

• Product support quality
• Competitive win rate
• Intention to buy more licenses
• Range of applications deployed
• Business achievement