Executive Summary

Collaborative Analytics

Analytics almost universally involves collaboration among a team of individuals. Interpreting the results of the analyses, choosing a course of action and tracking the implementation of those actions span multiple roles and departments within an enterprise. As a result, most of today’s analytics and business intelligence products support some form of collaboration.

ISG Research defines Collaborative Analytics as the process of sharing analyses, including reviewing, commenting on and approving them. It also includes the process of acting on the insights uncovered in analyses by assigning tasks to individuals and tracking the progress of those tasks to completion.

Capabilities that support the sharing of and communication about output from analytical processes help organizations maximize the value of analytics investments. Facilitating communication and collaboration among those involved in the decision-making process leads to more informed and better decisions. Our research shows that nearly 4 in 10 organizations use collaboration to support analytics processes, and more than one-half expect to use these capabilities in the future. Analytics and business intelligence software providers have recognized the value of collaboration, increasingly incorporating these capabilities into products.

More than a decade ago, social media tools like Facebook, X (formerly called Twitter) and LinkedIn brought on a wave of collaborative analytics and BI capabilities. We saw chat streams associated with specific analyses that users could like or endorse. The number of contributions made to the community was part of the user’s profile so others could weigh the importance of the input accordingly.

However, after an initial surge of interest in applying collaboration to business analyses, these efforts failed to gain traction and waned. Collaboration requires a large community of active individuals, and there simply were not enough people regularly engaged in using analytic products. Those early efforts also required users to participate in the dialog from within the analytics and BI products. Rather than working solely with those products, line-of-business workers spend their days using a variety of applications.

Two major changes now provide the glue to pull a community of collaborators together: mobile devices and enterprise collaboration tools. The significant expansion of mobile analytics and BI has made it easier for users to get involved. Perhaps more importantly, in the same way that social media users get notifications of activity via mobile devices, collaborative analytics and BI software providers use mobile notifications to engage participants in the analytics process. Expanded adoption of enterprise collaboration technologies—in place of or in addition to email—makes it more convenient to interact with notifications.

The analytics process typically involves multiple people with differing expertise and responsibilities. Collaborative tools can enable this diverse group of participants to coordinate their activities and share knowledge. To be effective, collaborative capabilities should cover the entire data and analytics process, ensuring participants understand the provenance of data as it is analyzed.

Under this approach, it is easy to identify subject matter experts to engage in the dialog. The team can discuss and document decision-making for compliance purposes, and the actions resulting from those decisions can be assigned and tracked to completion. We expect that by 2026, 8 in 10 BI software platforms will include collaborative capabilities designed to support AnalyticOps initiatives, improving decision-making, task management and compliance. These capabilities should be standard analytic processes in much the same way that visualization is now a standard part of data and analytic processes.

As organizations embrace more sophisticated applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and as analytics become more readily accessible via technologies such as natural language processing and generative AI, collaboration capabilities will become even more important. However, robust collaboration capabilities alone are insufficient. These capabilities must also include effective analytics. Our Value Index assessment methodology takes all of these factors into account.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative Analytics evaluates how analytics processes across software providers and products support communication. It includes the ways in which analyses can be distributed and shared, support for commenting, threaded discussions and alerting. The evaluation criteria also include how tasks can be assigned and tracked to completion and the ability to use mobile devices as part of the collaborative process.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of collaborative analytics as we define it: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Cloud Software Group, Domo, GoodData, Google Cloud, IBM, Idera, Incorta, Infor, insightsoftware, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Sisense, Salesforce (Tableau), ThoughtSpot and Zoho.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative Analytics is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for collaborative analytics software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for collaborative analytics to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of collaborative analytics technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of collaborative analytics software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating collaborative analytics systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Oracle atop the list, followed by Domo and SAP. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle has done so in six categories; SAP in five; Microsoft in four; and AWS, Domo, Google, IBM, Qlik and Zoho in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Domo, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ThoughtSpot and Zoho.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Google, Idera and SAS.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Infor, MicroStrategy and Qlik.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cloud Software, GoodData, Incorta, insightsoftware and Sisense.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle collaborative analytics, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability (50%), Reliability (5%), Adaptability (5%) and Manageability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Domo, Oracle and Zoho were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Oracle, SAP and IBM. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leaders, Domo, Microsoft and Qlik were also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative Analytics in 2024, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, and have more than 50 dedicated workers and at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 100 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The product must be actively marketed as an analytics product that includes collaborative capabilities to support analytics and decision-making processes with an enterprise including communicating the results of analyses and tracking the decisions and actions stemming from those analyses.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant collaborative analytics products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”