What Capabilities Do People Want in their BI platforms? Part 2

This blog entry is part of a series that reviews and discusses recent reports from Gartner.

In reviewing the capabilities people want in their BI platforms as reported in the "Functionality" report from Gartner, we examined the importance of reporting. Now let’s look at the fastest growing capabilities: Interactive Visualization, Dashboards, and Metadata Management.

Gartner comments “Use of reporting and ad hoc analysis experienced the most significant decline in extensive use while interactive visualization and dashboard use grew the most. These results suggest that many enterprises are moving beyond a focus on measurement of the past.”

Tableau users obviously know this – this is clear not only from how they rated Tableau in both Dashboards and Interactive Visualizations but in the percentage of them that are using Tableau heavily for those features.

Figure 1. Satisfaction and Usage: Dashboards

Source: BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate their BI Platform Functionality, 31 March 2011, Rita L. Sallam, Gartner Research Note G00211770. Chart represents customer perception and not Gartner's opinion.The chart may feature vendors that (in Gartner's opinion) do not deliver the functional capability described.N=1,127

Figure 2: Satisfaction and Usage: Interactive Visualiztion (ibid.)

Source: ibid. Chart represents customer perception and not Gartner's opinion.The chart may feature vendors that (in Gartner's opinion) do not deliver the functional capability described.N=1,127

With respect to metadata management, even as it grows quickly, it still has relatively low usage. A key point of Gartner’s analysis is that because an increasing number of deployments are using data discovery tools, those BI platforms do not require a full-on enterprise semantic layer — users can access and combine data sources directly. Although not a lot of Tableau users are making extensive use of metadata management, to those who are, we think having the Tableau-style capability to access, combine and manipulate data sources directly appears to be a type of metadata management they like. One of our customers recently called it "metadata in minutes." Check out how surveyed customers rated Tableau on metadata management.

Figure 3: Satisfaction and Usage: Metadata Management (ibid.)

Source: ibid. Chart represents customer perception and not Gartner's opinion.The chart may feature vendors that (in Gartner's opinion) do not deliver the functional capability described.N=1,127

Tableau has made the full Magic Quadrant report and the supporting Gartner detailed reports available at no charge at http://www.tableau.com/gartner-2010.