According to The BI Survey 15, BARC’s detailed annual audit of end-user sentiment on the business intelligence (BI) software market, published today.

PRESS RELEASE – LONDON, 19th October 2015

Pervasive BI: Still a dream

Usage of BI is becoming more pervasive, but remains a long way from being truly widespread in companies, according to The BI Survey 15. Following two years of zero growth, the median percentage of employees using BI in companies increased by more than 2% on last year to over 13%. From a sample of 2,071 responses, 45% of participants say their companies have less than 10% of employees using BI.

“New and emerging use cases – such as the steering and controlling of operational processes – and software buying preferences focused on ease of use, support for more concurrent users and flexibility are among the key drivers for this upturn and future broader acceptance,” said Dr. Carsten Bange, founder and CEO of BARC. “Greater adoption of cloud-based BI deployments in the future could also lead to higher penetration rates thanks to their flexibility and ease of deployment. However, our survey finds that the adoption rate for cloud-based BI solutions is still very low.”

Predictive analysis/data mining set for wider usage

Predictive analysis/data mining is only performed by 20% of respondents in this year’s BI Survey, but it stands to see the biggest gain of all BI tasks in the coming years with a further 40% planning to use BI solutions for this purpose.

Surge of BI usage in production/operations

Finance (85%), management (68%) and sales (62%) departments continue to be the leading BI users, but there has been surge of BI usage in production/operations (to 51%) in the last two years. If this pattern continues, production/operations could overtake sales and IT to become the third biggest user of the technology within the next three years.

“This finding is a result of the general trend in business intelligence to become more operational,” said Bange. “Reporting and analytical capabilities are embedded in or used in relation to operational processes, either to steer processes as they happen in real time or to understand processes better, for example to improve planning.”

This is just a small selection of the hundreds of findings in The BI Survey 15. Contact us for interview requests or to find out more.

About The BI Survey 15

The BI Survey 15 is based on user opinion from over 3,000 BI professionals worldwide about software selection, implementation and usage. Detailed feedback on a record 35 BI products from 30 vendors is analyzed and compared, including international giants IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL) and SAP, as well as BI specialists such as Information Builders, MicroStrategy (MSTR), Qlik, SAS Institute and Tableau (DATA).

About BARC

BARC is an enterprise software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to over 1,000 customers each year. BARC specializes in advising organizations on software selection in its core research areas of business intelligence, data management and enterprise content management.

Along with CXP and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), BARC forms part of the CXP Group – the leading European IT research and consulting firm with 140 staff in eight countries.

Press contact:

Mark Handford

+ 44 (0)1536 772 451

mhandford@barc-research.com

www.barc-research.com/BI-Survey