Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Collaborative Analytics: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

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.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of collaborative analytics software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating collaborative analytics offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Collaborative Analytics in 2024 finds Oracle first on the list, followed by Domo and SAP.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Domo
• Oracle
• Zoho

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Oracle
• SAP
• IBM

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Oracle, which has achieved this rating in six of the seven categories.
• SAP in five categories.
• Microsoft in four categories.
• AWS, Domo, Google, IBM, Qlik and Zoho in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle collaborative analytics, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our collaborative analytics blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.