David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

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.

Information 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.

Information 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