1. SAP
In terms of market share, SAP had significantly higher revenue than any other vendor at $3.1bn, with a 21.3% of the market, up 5.3% from 2012.
The German company delivers a broad range of BI and analytics capabilities best suited for large IT-managed deployments it claims requires robust governance and administrative capabilities.
Rita Sallam, research VP for BI and analytics at Gartner, told CBR: "SAP’s strategy has been to assemble a comprehensive BI and Analytics portfolio to a wide range of analytics use cases and users with a particular emphasis on companies that choose SAP as their enterprise BI standard, particularly if they also standardize on SAP for ERP applications."
SAP recently extended its 20-year partnership with Microsfot, which would allow SAP’s products to run on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure.
2. Qlik
Qlik claims to provide the most flexible BI software for turning data into knowledge.
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Called QlikView, the software lets business users see query results as well as related and filtered-out data with few simple clicks.
The Pennsylvania-based company, whose customers include Cisco, Qualcomm and the Swedish police, expects to release an updated version, called QlickView.Next, in the third quarter of this year.
Qlik’s VP of product management, Donald Farmer, says the big difference between the software and the rest of the market is that anyone can use it.
"The process we use is called natural analytics, which means we try to make it work the way the human mind works. We have this conviction that software is too often difficult to use with the human mind, it tends to work against it," he told CBR in an interview in May.
Natural analytics include QlikView’s associative in-memory engine, a user interface that supports workflow and collaborative capabilities that let users explore data together.
3. Tableau
The Seattle-based company provides similar BI software to Qlik to customers such as Google, Pepsi Co, Nestle and Deutsche Telekom.
In the latest quarter, Tableau said license sales for its business intelligence software rose 83% to $48.4m, winning 120 deals worth more than $100,000.
Gartner has also bolstered its credibility, having ranked it as the fastest growing and among the top 10 BI vendor in 2013.
Its latest offering, Tableau 8.1, claims to provide business users with better analytics by integrating with open-source statistics programmes, as well as SAML (security assertion markup language), support for external load balancers and IPv6 support among other features.
4. Microsoft
While Microsoft doesn’t capture the BI market the way it does with other technology spaces, it offers BI tools that include MS Office-Excel, SQL Server and SharePoint. .
According to Gartner, customers have cited TCO and license costs as their main reasons for selecting the vendor.
In February 2014, Microsoft launched Power BI for Office 365, which allows users to model and analyse their data as well as query datasets with complex natural language queries.
The company recently extended its 20-year partnership with SAP, which would allow SAP’s products to run on Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure.
Microsoft also enjoyed the highest growth of the BI and analytics software market in 2013, with revenue rising by 15.9% to $1.4bn.
5. MicroStategy
Photo source: MicroStrategy
What differentiates MicroStrategy’s flagship BI platform from other vendors lies in its ability to support more complicated and large-scale BI environments such as data warehouses.
Customers identify mobile BI, reporting, dashboards and location analytics as some of the main reasons for selecting the platform, according to Gartner.
The company also offers access to applications through mobile devices, which allows users to access information and analyses away from their desk.
Paul Zolfaghari, president of MicroStrategy, told CBR in February it mobile BI offering is ranked as number one in the industry.
"The customer satisfaction and expectations that are being met – are uniformly positive. They see great improvement in worker productivity, customer satisfaction, engagement ultimately better revenue and operating margins," he said.
6. IBM
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IBM has invested heavily in the BI market, having spent billions in acquisitions from Cognos and SPSS.
The IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge was launched this year, which invited teams to design mobile apps using its Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities to analyse and discover insights.
Alys Woodward, an analyst for BI tools in Western Europe, told CBR: "Going forward the former Project Neo, now known as Watson Analytics, is a visual analytics tool currently in beta release that combines advanced analytics, semantic search and visual exploration.
"This is a very exciting offering and shows the benefit of IBM’s broad range of technologies and how they can be used to underpin BI tools, so the user sees something attractive and easy to use, but powerful technology is at work under the covers."
The company, which had a 12.7% of the BI market in 2013, recently said it would stop selling software products in efforts to encourage customers to use its own products.
7. Oracle
In terms of market share, they come second after SAP with a 13.9% market share and revenues of $1.9bn, up 2.1% from 2012. .
Gartner’s Sallam said: "Oracle has a wide range of BI and analytics-related technologies and products that customers use as a BI platform. Its primary strategy around BI is less about innovation and more about leverage its core products to sell into its installed base.
Earlier this year, Oracle’s head of business analytics for the UK & Ireland, Paul O’Riordan, cautioned businesses from acting on analytics too hastily.
"One of the strengths but also one of the biggest weaknesses we have is that you can download applications from the cloud. That is fantastic in terms of adoption. It’s high-risk in terms of integrity," he said.
In February, Oracle annoucned that its WebLogic application server and Java programming language were being made available for Azure.
8. SAS
SAS’s analytics portfolio spans platforms for BI, performance management, data warehousing, in-memory databases, data integration, data quality, and content and social analytics.
Its strategy centers on making its BI platform easier to use to expand adoption beyond its traditional power user and SAS centric installed base, according to Gartner’s Sallam.
She told CBR: "Unlike most other BI platform vendors, SAS’s core strength is in its advanced analytical techniques, such as data mining, predictive modeling, simulation and optimisation, for which it is acknowledged as a Leader."
Earlier this month, the firm confirmed it will become the official analytics partner of British Rowing for the Rio 2016 Olympics, the first such partnership in the sport’s history.
SAP and SAS also partnered up to combine the latter’s analytics technology into SAP’s HANA platform.
