Who would win a battle between Qlikview, Tableau, BO and Power BI?

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1 Who would win a battle between Qlikview, Tableau, BO and Power BI? First of all, I want you to know you won't find the final answer in this post, but you could find the way to get your answer, as there can be many different fights and for each situation, there can be a winner. I will help you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and how to find the one which fits better with your defined casuistry. In any case, this analysis is made thinking about the situation today, but you have to realize that this is a live contest and all players are continually innovating, so you always have to take a look at the news the new versions bring. That said, we will start using a common tool in this times when it comes to analyzing any software in the market; The Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ). Who is Gartner and what is so magic in his quadrant? The Gartner Magic Quadrant is the brand name for a series of market research reports published by Gartner Inc., an American research and advisory firm which provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity, and participants. 1

2 There are many other sources where to find deep analysis of these platforms as Forrester, Ventana Research, and Barc. Here you can find an example of each one of them, but to make the analysis easier and don't get you crazy I will follow just with the Gartner Quadrant which is the most common one in the market. To understand how Gartner works first you have to know the evaluation criteria they are considering to place each vendor in one quadrant or another. The BI and analytics platform market's multiyear shift of focus from IT-led reporting to business-led selfservice analytics has reached a tipping point. Modern BI platforms support organizational needs for greater accessibility, agility and analytical insight from a diverse range of data sources. This was considered the future a few year ago but now it's the present and if one of the platforms is still not there, it will lose positions in the quadrant, and which is the most important thing, it won't contribute to empowering users of your company, it won't bring any economical save and it won't allow you to extract the best of your data in order to be more competitive and quicker developing. 2

3 We proceed with the analysis of the four selected platforms and their pros and cons, taking also in account the Gartner Magic Quadrant: The service runs on its own platform using in-memory technology. This lessens the program's dependency on IT professionals to regularly maintain and manage the system, thus reducing maintenance costs Customer experience is one of the biggest strenghs of Qlikview, making the adoption of the platform really smooth to the user, both the final user and the power user who could have a more active developer role. Qlikview works in memory, so unlike other BI systems, Qlikview focuses on speed, and users can locate and gather information on on the system faster than with other available platforms. To have an associative database instead of a relational one also helps to get quicker. Qlikview provides business heads with a clear snapshot of the company so they can deal with problems even before these affect the company. Qlikview allows in-house and multi-location correspondence, so that company heads have access to the same data and can correspond accordingly with each other. Qlikview is designed for the fast collection of required business data. However, this makes the system hardware-dependent. Without an advanced hardware system to support it, its use might prove to be inconvenient. Despite with functionality Direct Discovery you can connect directly to the sources (mainly used with social media) in the most part of cases it will replicate data in its associative database. Though the program promises certain independence from IT professionals, most companies will still need IT support for the program's installation and implementation. Anyway with Qlik Sense seems the final user will have more independence than with any other platform. 3

4 Its versatility, both in terms of deployment options across cloud and on-premises as well as the use cases it can be deployed against. Easy of use and easy to learn about it. Tableau's core product strengths continue to be its diverse range of data source connectivity, which is constantly expanding, as well as its interactive visualization and exploration capabilities. It doesn't have a very interesting enterprise pricing model. Tableau requires separate ETL tool. Weaknesses in the area of data integration across data sources. Tableau supports a diverse range of data connectivity options spanning relational, online analytical processing (OLAP), Hadoop, NoSQL and cloud sources but offers little support when it comes to integrating combinations of these sources in preparation for analysis. The most experienced users complain Tableau is lacking in advanced features and more sophisticated capabilities such as embedded BI, data preparation and metadata management. SAP Business Objects: 4

5 SAP has suffered the strongest fall down, moving from the Leather quadrant to the Visionaire one. This is mainly because despite they offer one of the most ambitious suite, Lumira (which is the most self-service tool of the whole suite) does not fulfill the requirements for a modern, business-user-centric BI platform. Great functionality and the integration with enterprise applications. Good performance for governed data discovery use cases and decentralized analytics. This outlined the potential strength of SAP Lumira as a data discovery component in combination with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform. While interoperability is still evolving, the combination allows SAP clients to balance governance and agility between a central BI platform and decentralized deployments. Perfect synchronization between SAP Lumira, SAP Hana and BO. The customer experience is still one of the failed subjects for SAP, and this rating was in the bottom quartile. Support continues to be a serious concern for clients, receiving among the lowest scores in the survey for support-related ratings and the lowest overall support ranking of all the Magic Quadrant vendors. SAP needs to further improve SAP Lumira with respect to product quality and functionality. Almost half of SAP's survey references outlined absent or weak functionality as the most important platform problem. SAP is orienting every product to the cloud, but the truth is only 24% of survey respondents indicated that they actively use SAP in the cloud, with another 10% planning to do so. This is a relatively low number and places it in the bottom quartile for this type of use. This ranking is partly attributable to the slightly inconsistent cloud BI offering from SAP. Its new SAP Cloud for Analytics offering might change this in the future because it intends to offer a complete, integrated platform in the cloud. 5

6 Price, price, price (as Steve Ballmer would have sung). Microsoft's cloud-based delivery model and low peruser pricing offers a low TCO. Easy of use is another reason many people are going with Power BI, and to be used to the Microsoft universe is clearly another plus. They are very integrated in the academic world in many universities around the world. Although it was born into a very restricted Microsoft world, it has continued to expand the number and variety of data sources it supports natively and it has also improved a seemly productive partner network to build out connectors and content that includes prebuilt reports and dashboards. Last pro it's still a big con, as it's more productive connecting to any Microsoft environment as to SAP or other platforms. Microsoft Power BI 2.x it one of the newest platforms to arrive to the market and it is has a cloud-only delivery model. As we have seen with BO, companies are still not prepared for a 100% cloud environment. Another consideration has to do with the ETL processes. If you host data using either Tableau or Power-BI, and that data exists on premise, you have to keep it synchronized. Depending on the business requirements for having up to date data, this could prove to be a bottleneck. Conclusion: All of them are good options, but depending on the environment you are working with, the systems and licenses you already have and your business strategy, one of them could fit better than the others. Depending on your drivers there can be some preferences: Price: Power BI Self-Service and Data Discovery: Qlikview, Power BI and Tableau Cloud: BO and Power BI ETL included: BO and Qlikview Connectivity: BO and Qlikview Big Data: BO and Qlikview Customer Experience: Power BI, Qlikview and Tableau 6