Complacent Business Intelligence Vendors Oblivious to User Concerns about Poor Support and Slow Performance.

BARC releases The BI Survey 8 by Nigel Pendse 

LONDON -- A major new independent survey reveals a huge disparity between vendor and end-user opinion in the business intelligence (BI) software market.

"BI vendors have a much rosier view of their offerings than their customers," said Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 8. "This discrepancy is particularly evident in the perception of support quality provided by vendors. More than 51% of vendors claimed they delivered excellent product support, but only 27% of users and 24% of implementation consultants agreed."

"But it doesn't end there," Pendse continued. "While vendors do not believe slow query performance is a significant issue, it is the most commonly-reported problem by users. Instead, vendors blame BI deployment problems on customer issues, such as poor quality data and company politics. Vendors are unlikely to fix product problems that they don't even acknowledge."

Similarly, while typical customers say that only 8% of their employees use BI products, vendors claim a figure 75% higher. In fact, we found that the vendors' self-perception was notably more positive than user opinion across the board."

These findings, and many more, are published in The BI Survey 8 by Nigel Pendse, the most in-depth research report available on the BI market.

Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC, publisher of The BI Survey 8, explains: "The BI Survey serves as an annual reality check for the BI industry. It's a platform for the worldwide BI user community to air its views. With such a large sample of users responding to the Survey, the industry has to sit up and take notice."

Based on detailed feedback from a staggering 2622 users, consultants and vendors, The BI Survey 8 compares 23 BI products from vendors including IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL) and SAP, providing readers with invaluable information to support tool selection projects.

Business Application Research Center (BARC) is a leading independent software industry analyst delivering product evaluations, conferences, market research and consulting to customers worldwide.

Nigel Pendse is the author of The BI Survey and editor of The OLAP Report, and is an independent consultant and speaker on a variety of BI-related subjects.