The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics: The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards

THE MARKET

Future Market Insights expects the global business intelligence market to top $28.2 billion this year and hit $56.2 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 7.1 percent.

BI systems have been considerably improved by ongoing technological breakthroughs, such as in-cloud computing, Big Data analytics, predictive modeling, and artificial intelligence. Increased scalability, flexibility, and affordability have also made business intelligence solutions more viable for companies of all sizes.

While the market previously relied heavily on professional services firms to make sense of all the data available, that is changing. Today’s business intelligence is far more self-service.

And while in the past marketing was the largest user of business intelligence, that is changing as well. In 2022, sales and marketing combined accounted for just a 42.3 percent share of the total market. Other uses have included finance, billing, logistics, and even human resources.

THE TOP FIVE

While many business professionals have long seen traditional BI solutions as too cumbersome, too complex, and too slow, they see Domo as something different, providing direct access to business data via any device without having to rely on IT to generate reports. The strength of Domo’s platform, which delivers seamless data visualization, analytics, and collaboration tools, is its simplicity, analysts say: Domo gives users direct, real-time access to all their critical business information, including micro- and macro-level analysis, in one place within a single dashboard view.

Originally born from Excel as an add-on, Microsoft’s Power BI has since grown to stand solidly on its own, but its real strength has always been its integrations with other Microsoft applications and partner solutions. It also supports among the largest pool of data sources for analytics, reporting, data mining, and data visualization. Paul Robichaux, senior director of product management at KeepIt, called Power BI “a market leader in the business intelligence space,” which is why his company recently partnered with Microsoft to provide native backup options for reports, dashboards, workspaces, and datasets in Power BI.

Already a strong contender in the business intelligence space, Qlik propelled itself higher with its May acquisition of Talend, bolstering its data integration, transformation, quality, and governance capabilities. And Qlik has also introduced a suite of OpenAI connectors that will help customers bring generative AI-crafted content into Qlik to support a wide range of cloud analytics and automation use cases. Dan Vesset, group vice president of data and analytics research at IDC, said in a statement that these OpenAI connectors “will provide organizations with tools to augment the ongoing work of their analysts and developers while enabling organizations to establish necessary controls and governance to fully leverage this latest technology.”

Salesforce has given its Tableau business intelligence product line a huge number of upgrades since acquiring it in 2019. Among the additions this year were a guided user experience; advanced analytics, scripting, and prediction tools; the ability for users to build dynamic dashboards, receive detailed event data, and manage user controls; a Salesforce Data Cloud Connector; multi-row calculations; Data Stories to Tableau Server, which uses AI to translate graphs, charts, and spreadsheets into natural language insights; and data mapping. Salesforce also integrated Tableau with its Slack collaboration platform and launched several AI-powered capabilities that combine personalization and automation. And now, Salesforce is building its Einstein and Einstein GPT AI engines into Tableau.

SAS’s business intelligence portfolio, long considered one of the most feature-rich in the industry, has also had a reputation for being difficult to use. The company has been actively working to overcome that flaw, and this year expanded on that effort. It also partnered with Amazon Web Services to further expand its reach through the AWS Marketplace. Mona Chadha, director of infrastructure, category management, and partner development at AWS, in a statement called SAS an “industry-leading martech solution that has been assisting marketing leaders to increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with AI and real-time decisions for many years.”