Susan Joly

@e2valpo

April 15, 2015

Reap the Benefi ts o f BI Plat form Integrat ion 2

Overview ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Get it together ............................................................................................................................................................................. 3

BI and analytics integration criteria ........................................................................................................................................ 3

Internal platform integration ................................................................................................................................................... 4

Development and integration ................................................................................................................................................. 4

The right fit ................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Reap the Benefi ts o f BI Plat form Integrat ion 3

Overview Selecting a business intelligence solution can be overwhelming, given all the dimensions to consider—for example, business

requirements, size of the implementation, the product’s ease of use, price-to-value perception, among others. The BARC Business

Intelligence Survey 14, with results released in October 2014, makes this task slightly easier, by providing key dimensions or key

performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring and comparing vendors, based on customer feedback.

This series of articles explores some key vendor and product dimensions that BARC measured. We are grouping these dimensions

into the following themes or categories:

Successful, large-scale, governed BI programs—for instance, project success, proportion of employees who use a product

in their organization

Enterprise-grade, end-to-end BI platform—for instance, query performance, discovery/visualization capabilities, mobile

capabilities

Users at ease with practical business gains—for instance, price-to-value perception, customer satisfaction

* Pyramid Analytics consistently scored high in dimensions that fall within these themes.

To see the headline results for Pyramid Analytics in the BARC BI Survey 14, download the summary at

http://www.pyramidanalytics.com/pages/resources/analytics-reports/barc-bi-survey-2014.aspx.

Get it together Whether it’s a puzzle or an engine, you might have all the pieces or parts, but if they aren’t assembled together and with the right fit, the individual pieces do no good and, in the case of an engine, can work against each other. Organizations whose workflow involves a platform that isn’t integrated can face various setbacks with their BI solutions:

Higher implementation, IT, administration, training, and maintenance costs

Lack of collaboration and of sharing reports, dashboards, and other content

Greater difficulty in creating BI content in general

A user experience that isn’t seamless or consistent, and that doesn’t meet user needs

Rather than having a motley collection of pieces that you need to fit together yourself into a single platform, Pyramid Analytics’ BI Office Suite offers a BI solution that’s already integrated.

In fact, customer feedback indicates that platform integration is one of the strengths of BI Office.

BI and analytics integration criteria The 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics lists 13 BI and analytics platform capabilities or criteria that are part of the overall analysis when it comes to BI vendors. The following criteria in the Magic Quadrant are specifically related to integration:

Internal Platform Integration

Development and Integration

For more information, read the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

Let’s look at these criteria one by one.

Reap the Benefi ts o f BI Plat form Integrat ion 4

Internal platform integration The Magic Quadrant characterizes Internal Platform Integration as follows: “A common look and feel, install, query engine, shared metadata, promotability across all platform components.

Integration with complementary BI capabilities

Ability to promote business-user-generated data mashups to the systems of record

Common security model and administration application components across the platform

Integrated semantic/metadata layer

Integrated and common front-end tools”*

For more information, read the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

We believe that Pyramid Analytics is a stellar player as an integrated platform. For instance:

Unified user interface: BI Office is a unified platform with one central server and one integrated user interface. All activities such as data discovery, authoring reports, publications, charts and dashboards, and even meshing data models can be done from the same browser-based interface.

Common look and feel: BI Office uses a Microsoft Office-like user interface throughout its platform in modules such as Data Discovery, Dashboards, and Publisher. This gives the front-end tool a common, consistent user experience for production, reporting, ad-hoc reporting, analysis, and dashboarding.

Shared metadata: With centralized business logic, all BI Office objects are seamlessly connected including charting, graphing, and data, which keeps data accurate and consistent.

Promotability: Content can be morphed and expanded, and then promoted to IT systems of record, and propagated across a team, organization, and beyond.

Security: BI Office Administrator is an all-in-one administration interface that allows administrators to manage users, licenses, roles, data sources, settings, and track usage. BI Office keeps detailed logs and allows administrators to analyze usage patterns and performance issues quickly and easily.

Development and integration In addition to the criterion of Internal Platform Integration, a second integration-related criterion in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics is Development and Integration. The Magic Quadrant characterizes Development and Integration as follows: “The platform should provide a set of programmatic and visual tools and a development workbench for building reports, dashboards, queries and analysis. It should enable scalable and personalized distribution, scheduling and alerts, and workflow of BI and analytics content and applications via email, to a portal or to mobile devices. It should include the ability to embed and customize BI platform components in a business process, application or portal.”*

For more information, read the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

Reap the Benefi ts o f BI Plat form Integrat ion 5

Here again, we believe that BI Office serves up capabilities that closely align with this description.

A set of programmatic and visual tools; development workbench:

Quickly and easily create reports and dashboards, and perform analysis through modules such as Data Discovery, Dashboards, and Publisher.

Get fully interactive visualization, charts, grids, gauges, and geospatial maps with one-click connectivity back to the Dashboards module. All of these are accessible—in a simple WYSIWYG user interface—to business users without any programming knowledge.

Create relationships/interactions between dashboard panels via integrated graphics tools.

Display data that’s integrated from many sources. Can be used with SQL Analysis Services, and with OLAP, and tabular models; handled structured and unstructured data.

Create once, deploy everywhere--for all modalities where content is consumed. Write business logic once, and safely re-use and deploy broadly; re-use formulas, queries, rule sets.

Scalable and personalized distribution:

Modify and extend content across the platform.

Design templates to share and control formatting and output.

Usage and sharing of reports, dashboards, and analysis can scale out from individual users to peers to an entire organization and beyond, by changing the security setting in a dialog box.

Scheduling/alerts: Auto-generate alerts/reporting based on predefined events, dates, and triggers.

Workflow via email, portal, or mobile devices: Get content via desktop browser, tablet, and mobile.

Ability to embed and customize BI platform components:

Pyramid Analytics offers a complete API reference guide to help with embedding content into SharePoint, web applications, or portals with APIs, and includes an example application.

Easily copy/paste components into applications.

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The right fit With an integrated platform, you can address some of the challenges that many organizations face in terms of their BI solutions, and have positive effects: a seamless user experience, lower cost of maintenance, greater collaboration, greater degree of sharing, less difficulty in creating new content. BI program leaders, IT, and business users can have confidence in a single platform that drives access to information deep into an

organization. This integration not only meets centralized standards in terms of governance, scalability, and security, but also lets

users access, consume, and expand on the data.

*Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Rita L. Sallam, Bill Hostmann, Kurt Schlegel, Joao Tapadinhas, Josh Parenteau, Thomas W. Oestreich, 23 February 2015.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.