David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Information Builders Earns Top Analytics and BI Honors

Posted by David Menninger on Feb 6, 2019 6:00:00 AM

I am happy to offer some insights on Information Builders drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence software. We evaluated Information Builders and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Ventana_Research-Analytics_and_BI-Value_Index-OverallInformation Builders’ products offer one of the most comprehensive sets of capabilities in our Value Index assessment. The company has made recent investments to update the user experience, creating a much more modern user interface. Its products excel in the areas of integration and customization as well as manageability. The architecture used is based on a model of accessing the data directly in a variety of commercial databases and Hadoop distributions. The products support hundreds of different data sources.

ABI_Information_BuildersInformation Builders ranks first overall in the Value Index assessment. It also ranks first in Manageability and second in Capability. The breadth of the product line helps in its rankings here and the company provides deep support across all the Manageability criteria we evaluated. Its products also perform well in Reliability where it ranks third and Adaptability where it ranks fourth.

The lowest rankings for Information Builders are in Usability and Validation where it ranked eighth and seventh respectively. While the user interface has been improved dramatically, more support for collaboration among users would help. And more information and better demonstration of financial growth would improve its Viability ranking.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about Information Builders and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director

Get the full picture Read the Analytics & Business Intelligence Value Index report

Topics: Data Science, business intelligence, Mobile Intelligence, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Digital Technology

David Menninger

Written by David Menninger

David is responsible for the overall research direction of data, information and analytics technologies at Ventana Research covering major areas including Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence and Information Management along with the additional specific research categories including Information Applications, IT Performance Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence and IoT, and Data Science. David is also responsible for examining the role of cloud computing, collaboration and mobile technologies as they affect these areas. David brings to Ventana Research over twenty-five years of experience, through which he has marketed and brought to market some of the leading edge technologies for helping organizations analyze data to support a range of action-taking and decision-making processes. Prior to joining Ventana Research, David was the Head of Business Development & Strategy at Pivotal a division of EMC, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Vertica Systems, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Oracle, Applix, InforSense and IRI Software. David earned his MS in Business from Bentley University and a BS in Economics from University of Pennsylvania.