The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics: The 2022 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Research firm Future Market Insights has valued the current worldwide business intelligence (BI) market at $26.7 billion and expects it to double to $52.6 billion by 2026, growing at a compound annual rate of 7 percent.

Fellow analyst firm SkyQuest Technology Consulting’s numbers vary slightly, with the current market valued at $24.9 billion and expectations for a $42.1 billion valuation by 2028, at a CAGR of 7.6 percent.

Regardless of the numbers, it cannot be denied that business intelligence is one of the most popular and rapidly growing areas of information technology, fueled by the need for companies to make better decisions faster, manage data more effectively, optimize processes, and uncover new competitive insights

SkyQuest has estimated that more than 43 percent of organizations already have or are deploying some form of BI solution, and nearly half plan to deploy more BI applications in the next 12 months.

The Top Five

Domo, long considered a top-tier BI, analytics, and data provider, has only gotten better in the past year with multicloud platform releases and the late September launch of its Sandbox product, which allows marketers to collaborate with team members and partners before putting new BI-related content into production. Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, calls the company “the best of the best-of-breed” in the BI market. Customers appreciate Domo for its overall product functionality, reliability, ease of use, customization, and extensibility.

For many, Google Analytics is the default tool for business intelligence related to their web presence, and with good reason. Simplicity of use is one of the keys, but it goes beyond that. “Companies choose Google for its artificial intelligence/machine learning and automation capabilities,” Wang says. “When they need a simple BI solution, they are increasingly looking to Google.” And that is only expected to intensify as the data privacy waters get more and more muddy in the coming months and years.

As with many of its products, Microsoft excels in the BI space on the strength of its integrations alone. Certainly its tie-ins to Microsoft’s business productivity tools and Azure cloud platform make it a natural choice for many businesses, but the external partner ecosystem for Power BI is always growing. Among the many companies tying their products to Power BI this year alone were Reputation, Informatica, DataSelf, ActivTrak, and Data Hawk. “The omnipresence of Power BI and the integration with its Office productivity tools make it the de facto choice based on availability and usage,” Wang, says.

After spending $15.7 billion to buy longtime industry leader Tableau Software in 2019, Salesforce has since turned it into the “enterprise standard for customers who choose not to go with a Microsoft solution,” Wang says. He notes that Salesforce has done pretty well improving Tableau in the past three years, including integrating it with Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics, which is quite an impressive AI product in its own right, using different technologies and serving different use cases than Tableau. And Salesforce has made the product far easier to use, with a slew of new data connectors, web authoring tools, and workflow triggers. “We’re letting our data developer community unleash its creativity with a flexible platform to help even more people see and understand data,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer for Tableau at Salesforce, in a statement. “Our goal is to bring analytics in the flow of work by enabling developers to discover the data they need, leverage visualization and trusted exploration capabilities, and integrate analytics into their own applications.”

While many of the other business intelligence vendors have long emphasized simplicity and ease of use, SAS has had a reputation for being much more difficult and clunky to use, even though its products are among the most feature-rich in the market. That is starting to change, according to Wang. “This is the product for advanced data geeks, and now fully in the cloud, it is available for the rest of us,” he says. “SAS has gotten better at making its product easier to use for business users.”