Business Discovery: Powerful, User-Driven BI

The Tectonic Plates Are Shifting in the BI Software Market

The promise of business intelligence (BI) software is to enable decision makers at all levels in an organization to leverage data for business advantage—to explore data, draw insights and meaningful conclusions, and make better decisions. Traditional BI solutions have delivered reliable, operational data tied to pre-defined, static reports—but haven’t provided the self-service, on-the-fly, user-driven source of insight people crave for addressing daily business challenges.

IT organizations tend to favor report-based BI solutions from stack vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. But business users are becoming more vocal, demanding, and influential than ever. They are going out and purchasing BI software on their own–and they’re not buying traditional BI solutions.

Business users are choosing what Gartner calls data discovery platforms, and we call Business Discovery platforms.1 And they’re buying in droves. According to market research firm IDC, end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools (which include Business Discovery platforms) comprised more than 80% of the BI tools market in 2010.2 In this research, IDC found that smaller vendors such as QlikTech are outpacing the overall market growth.

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