Last updated: November 17th, 2020
When you want to make a major purchase, you ask friends and family for recommendations. The same holds true for companies researching business intelligence (BI) software products. You want to ask the people who use them what they do and don’t like.
Analyst firm BARC has done it for you – and survey participants gave ibi the highest ranking in 22 categories in its peer groups, and a “leader” ranking in 34 other categories across its three peer groups.
BARC states that ibi “is one of the best large global BI vendors in terms of providing a high level of customer support.”
For its “The BI and Analytics Survey 21,” BARC surveyed 2,591 people, with ibi customers evaluating us in the “large global enterprise BI platforms” (15 top rankings) and “large international BI vendors” (6 top rankings) peer groups. In the “embedded analytics-focused products” peer groups, we earned top ranking for “distribution of reports” and 11 “leader” rankings.
The survey uses peer groups to ensure it is comparing products that are likely to compete in the marketplace. In these survey peer groups, ibi competes against – and outperformed in the rankings – companies such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle, MicroStrategy, Qlik, and Tableau.
Where and how did we shine? For one thing, the survey results confirm ibi’s dedication to its customers. Survey responses earned us top rankings for vendor support, implementer support, customer satisfaction, customer experience, and recommendations in the large global enterprise BI platforms group. BARC states that ibi “is one of the best large global BI vendors in terms of providing a high level of customer support.”
Users gave WebFOCUS, ibi’s analytics platform, high marks in platform-specific categories, including operational BI key performance indicators (KPIs), embedded BI, dashboards, distribution of reports, functionality, flexibility, ad hoc query, and analyses. More than 90 percent of users surveyed rated ibi price-to-value as excellent or good, compared to 71 percent for the average BI tool.
The report cites comments from ibi customers on what they like most about the company and its products, including:
- Always evolving to fit needs
- Handling large volumes of data and returning valuable answer sets quickly
- Making anything possible through its robust platform
- Allowing large numbers of users and activity through a non-persistent connection
- Providing a wide range of functions in one platform instead of several smaller tools, with extensive possibilities for designing reports
- Supporting low administration effort, including automated job scheduling and web services
- Affording ease of use and robustness
Based on user rankings, BARC concludes that enterprise-wide reporting is a particular strength of ibi. They say, ”When it comes to serving the complex needs of thousands of users and supplying them with the information they require when they need it, mature capabilities for report definition, distribution, and scalability for large amounts of users come into their own. The median number of WebFOCUS users lies at 500, way above The BI and Analytics Survey average of 82 users.”
Reflecting back on five years of survey data, BARC finds that ibi is consistently top ranked in vendor support, customer satisfaction, flexibility, customer experience, and operational BI. Our competitive win rate is also top ranked, most often against Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and IBM Cognos Analytics.
About BARC
BARC is a leading enterprise software industry analyst and consulting firm delivering information to more than 1,000 customers annually. Along with CXP and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), BARC forms part of the CXP Group – the leading European IT research and consulting firm with 155 staff in eight countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
