TechRadar™: Business Intelligence, Q1 2015

For a number of years now, business intelligence (BI) has remained the No. 1 software application category in companies' implementation project plans. Increasing market volatility and empowered customers put a premium on data and information to facilitate strategic decision-making. Meanwhile, in the era of big data, the potential to mine and analyze vast quantities of data is transforming activities across every company's value chain. Whether it's optimizing the customer experience via social media or improving logistics by embedding sensors in vehicles, data analysis is simply critical, and reporting, querying, and analytics technologies are a key part of firms' BI investments. Such technologies help explore and interpret a company's data to guide crucial decisions — but deciding which BI technologies to implement is complicated by the wide range of existing and newer technologies. This diversity of options creates challenges in distinguishing what is possible, available, and appropriate for specific business scenarios. This report is an update to Forrester's TechRadar™: BI Analytics, Q3 2013. This report provides a framework for companies to assess potential investments in 15 key BI technologies and highlights the changes that some of the technologies have seen since the initial 2013 version.