The Best Business Intelligence/Analytics: The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Fortune Business Insights valued the global business intelligence market at $29.4 billion in 2023 and expects it to grow from $32 billion in 2024 to $63.8 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 9 percent.

Business intelligence software encompasses the infrastructure that stores, gathers, and evaluates the data generated through companies’ activities as well as process analysis, data mining, descriptive analysis, and performance benchmarking.

A recent survey by Qlik and Accenture found that 67 percent of the global workforce has access to BI tools, and 75 percent has access to data analytics software. A new focus for the market is on what is being referred to as continuous intelligence, which fuses real-time analytics into business operations with the help of augmented analytics. Another key focus is the continued embedding of business intelligence and analytics in other business and personal applications, such as enterprise resource planning and CRM. The market continues to struggle, though, with difficulties in abstracting data from third-party systems due to poor data quality.

The Top Five

Domo’s business intelligence solutions are known for their easy-to-use visualizations, dashboards, alerts, and reports and offer a wide range of capabilities, including data exploration, reporting, predictive analytics, and visualizations; now, with the infusion of Domo.AI, it’s even easier to use. Analysts hail the Domo platform for its accessibility, especially for smaller teams that might not have huge IT resources.

Microsoft PowerBI has been the BI powerhouse for many years, and 2024 has been no different. The platform is a collection of software and connectors that work together to turn unrelated sources of data, whether it’s in an Excel spreadsheet or assorted cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights that can easily be shared with anyone you want. Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, says PowerBI’s “high degree of usability and functionality make it an attractive choice for companies with Office desktops.”

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides an integrated, end-to-end, fully integrated enterprise performance management system with query, reporting, analysis, alerting, data integration and management, financial performance management, operational BI, data warehousing, and mobile and desktop capabilities. Not all of these are CRM-related, of course, but what Oracle does in the CRM realm it does very well, analysts agree.

Since acquiring Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion, Salesforce has put a lot of energy into its business analytics lineup with the goal of helping companies explore insights and anticipate needs faster, infusing AI into the products to get to the “why” behind businesses performance and identify next best actions. “Between Analytics Cloud, Data Cloud, Tableau, and the Einstein One platform, Salesforce provides a broad and deep set of analytics tools for all kinds of CRM data,” Wettemann says. And it’s only improving, as this year so far Salesforce has already added Tableau Pulse, a generative AI and data analytics solution included within Tableau Cloud, and Einstein Copilot for Tableau, an AI assistant for self-service analytics, workflows, and strategic data insights.

Zoho Analytics lets users connect and blend data from more than 500 sources. It combines data integration, preparation, analysis, storytelling, collaboration, security, and governance features, and now that it’s been made more usable with Zoho’s Zia AI interface, it’s even more functional and easy to use. Zia will enable Zoho Analytics to receive suggestions and import public datasets; blend public data with business data; define formulas for metrics; create queries from questions in natural language; and create a set of synonyms for table column names. “Zoho’s analytics and AI are fully embedded in the Zoho platform and have both a high degree of usability and great flexibility,” Wettemann says.