REPORT

The Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI Platforms, Q3

2021
The 15 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
August 16, 2021

BE Boris Evelson

with Srividya Sridharan, Danielle Jessee, Fayzan Sabri

Summary

In our 25-criterion evaluation of augmented business intelligence (BI) platform providers, we identified the
15 most significant ones — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Domo, Google, IBM, Microsoft, MicroStrategy,
Oracle, Qlik, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, Sisense, ThoughtSpot, TIBCO Software, and Yellowfin — and
researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps
business insights professionals select the right one for their needs.

Topics

BI Platforms Get A Shot Of … Evaluation Summary Vendor Offerings Vendor Profiles 

BI Platforms Get A Shot Of AI, While Holding True To Their

Core
Forrester clients often ask: With all of the advancements in AI and machine learning (ML), do we still
need an enterprise BI platform? The question has the right intent but is phrased improperly. Instead,
the question should be: What can AI do to further democratize access to data and keep improving
insights-driven maturity? With this in mind, business insights pros now seek augmented BI features
that go beyond reporting, querying, data visualizations, and basic descriptive and diagnostic
analytics. Augmented BI introduces vital emerging capabilities — empowering users to become
citizen data scientists drawing on the power of ML and broadening the reach of data and analytics
to all decision-makers via conversational UIs. Industry leaders already realize the mission-critical
nature of these platforms — deploying BI platforms infused with the power of AI can be a key
competitive differentiator. In 2020, 49% of data and analytics decision-makers at firms with an
advanced level of insights-driven business maturity expect their organization to use augmented BI
platforms, compared with only 31% at firms with a beginner level of maturity.

As a result, augmented BI platforms customers should look for providers that prioritize investments
in:

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 Machine learning for deeper insights and conversational UI for broader access. Professional
data scientists are scarce and expensive. In 2020, two-thirds of data and analytics decision-
makers reported that their organization was recruiting more talent with advanced data and
analytics skills. Augmented BI platforms address this challenge by empowering business
insights pros to become citizen data scientists and with a single click identify key drivers or
influencers on a metric, find anomalies, or project a forecast or a trend. The platforms also
make the lives of professional data scientists and data engineers easier by letting them author
and train new ML models in the same platform where models are going to be deployed,
eliminating the need to integrate multiple platforms, improving model transparency and
governance, and reducing the likelihood of errors that may result from platform-to-platform
data and metadata handoffs. Lastly, augmented BI platforms further democratize insights by
allowing business pros not comfortable with complex point-and-click, drag-and-drop platform
instrumentation to converse with data in natural language via natural language query (NLQ) or
natural language generation (NLG).

Core enterprise BI to strengthen the insights-driven foundation. While AI-infused BI is an

emerging capability and is the focus and scope of this evaluation, the technology is still new
and relatively untested for success. About a third of reference customers for vendors reported
not using the augmented BI functionality of the platforms, and those who used the ML, NLQ,
and NLG features reported lower levels of satisfaction than with any other platform
capabilities. For now, while highly mature to a point of commoditization, tried-and-true core
enterprise BI (i.e., reports and dashboards with interactive slicing/dicing capabilities to perform
descriptive and diagnostic analysis) remains a staple component in most enterprises’ tech
portfolios, even if the platform differentiation based on these core BI features is eroding. In
2020, data and analytics decision-makers said their organization allocated only 23% of their
total data management and analytics budgets to AI and predictive analytics, but as much as
45% for combined investments in reporting, dashboards, performance management, data
exploration, and OLAP.

The operations part of DevOps to scale augmented BI applications across the enterprise. BI
platforms have gone a full circle, from mostly supporting IT and app dev professionals’
requirements, to becoming business user focused, and now back to reemphasizing an
important role of DevOps for enterprise scalability. Catering to the needs of business insights
pros is still a top priority, but one can’t scale out BI applications across a large enterprise
unless the platform provides comprehensive support for the operations part of DevOps.
Forrester still sees significant platform differentiation in version control, version comparison,
code branches, unit testing functionality built right into the platform, support for agile app dev
methodologies, and integration with popular software development lifecycle (SDLC) platforms
like Git (in 2021, 60% of software developers report use open source or one of the commercial
versions of Git).

Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and
Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does not represent the entire
vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our report Now Tech:
Augmented BI Platforms, Q2 2021.

We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product
evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see
Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to
download the tool.
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 Figure 1

Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI Platforms, Q3 2021

Figure 2

Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI Platforms Scorecard, Q3 2021

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 Vendor Offerings

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 Forrester included 15 vendors in this assessment: Amazon Web Services, Domo, Google, IBM,
Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlik, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, Sisense, ThoughtSpot, TIBCO
Software, and Yellowfin (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Vendor Profiles
Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.

Leaders

Microsoft Power BI is a clear choice for Azure and/or O365 clients. It is hard not to consider
Power BI as your top choice for an enterprise BI platform, especially if your organization plans
to deploy most of its business and productivity applications and store and process most of the
data on Microsoft Azure. Its augmented BI capabilities include 32 out-of-the-box (OOTB) ML
models for business users, guided ML (Azure AutoML) for citizen data scientists, and
integration with Jupyter notebooks for data science pros. The platform boasts a unique “data
prep by example” functionality for ingesting non-row-/column-based data sets (like labels) as
part of its augmented data preparation function (Power Query), and graph analytics (Forced
Directed Graph) — a rarity among the traditional SQL-/OLAP-based BI platforms. The platform
also crosses the T’s and dots the I’s for most core enterprise BI functionality, including
enterprise reporting many will recognize as the modern version of SQLServer Reporting
Services (SSRS). The Q&A feature of Power BI is robust but offers an inconsistent experience:
fully featured NLQ at a specific data set level, while mostly limited to search at the portal level
(a gap stated by client references). The major limiting factor of the platform is its few
deployment options — a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version only available on Azure and an
on-premises version of Power BI supporting a subset of functionality (Microsoft views on-
premises Power BI merely as a stepping-stone toward eventual cloud migration). Forrester
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 recommends that clients closely examine SQLServer, specifically SQLServer Analysis Services
(SSAS) documentation, for scalability or any other limitations, as Power BI in most cases
inherits these constraints.

Oracle Analytics Cloud should be on your shortlist, even for non-Oracle customers. No vendor
has unlimited R&D, sales, and marketing budgets — all require razor-sharp focus, and the
Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) product team chooses to focus on infusing augmented BI
throughout its platform and the rest of the Oracle Fusion Applications ecosystem. While the
team doesn’t actively go after non-Oracle opportunities, it doesn’t mean your organization
shouldn’t shortlist OAC. Its core enterprise BI capabilities are top-notch, include advanced
enterprise reporting and nearly 50 OOTB data visualizations. Augmented BI capabilities
include ML-based “explain” functionality, automated machine learning (AutoML)-like features in
the OAC Data Flows engine, and advanced graph/network analytics. Its augmented data prep
includes a useful “custom knowledge” capability that’s a step beyond simple data-value
lookups (for example, product-detail data can be ingested once and used to enrich product
analysis consistently in every new application). OAC, and its NLQ feature specifically, will
strongly appeal to global clients, as it is available in 28 languages, more than any other
platform evaluated in this research. OAC’s data storytelling functionality is based on an OEM of
an industry-leading NLG provider, Yseop, and is part of the core OAC platform. OAC clearly
appeals to customers of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and database, as well as Fusion and
NetSuite applications, but to broaden its customer base even further, Oracle would need to
invest in bundling more connectors, including connectors with content (solutions) to more non-
Oracle business applications.

Sisense can be your one-stop shop for BI and data science personas. Sisense Fusion comes
very close to letting your organization consolidate several types of analytic application
development platforms. The platform comes with a starter set of 12 OOTB ML models for
deeper insights into data beyond descriptive analytics for any business user, guided ML
(AutoML) for citizen data scientists, and a native data science notebook based on functionality
acquired from Periscope Data. It also offers integration with Jupyter notebook capabilities that
will appeal to professional data engineers and data scientists. Sisense Fusion NLQ (including
initiating queries from Slack) is powerful, and its data storytelling functionality is based on an
OEM of an industry-leading NLG provider, Narrative Science (a no-cost add-on). Sisense Pulse
provides an automated anomaly detection capability out of the box. Sisense Fusion’s
integration with Git will appeal to DevOps pros. Lastly, don’t forget Sisense’s unique IP: an in-
chip processing architecture (the vendor says that its proprietary technology can move data
between RAM and CPU faster than native OS capabilities) that supports extreme scalability
(claims confirmed by customer references). To expand Sisense’s appeal to a broader
audience, the company needs to invest in BI fabric and more prepackaged business-domain-
specific solutions.

Salesforce (Tableau) gets a massive boost of augmented BI via Einstein Discovery. Tableau
needs no reintroduction — it has been a dominant force in enterprise data visualization for at
least a decade and a half. Its unique IP — visual query language (VisQL) — still allows Tableau
users to create and customize more data visualizations than any other BI platform, which
reference customers called out as an advantage. While Tableau acquired and built some of its
own augmented BI capabilities prior to 2019, it is the infusion of Salesforce Einstein
functionality that significantly boosted Tableau’s advanced analytics capabilities beyond
descriptive and diagnostic analytics. Tableau users now benefit from several OOTB ML models
(part of the Explain Data functionality), and users of Tableau’s cloud SaaS version enjoy a full
guided ML capability via the integrated Salesforce Einstein Discovery product. Tableau also
packages some of the most advanced geospatial analytics capabilities, including native
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 geospatial operators like geospatial joins, buffers, and geofencing. Tableau now also offers
native NLQ capabilities (AskData, which requires some setup to create a “Lens” for each
indexed data set) and NLG capabilities (the latter as part of Tableau’s Explain Data). Tableau’s
foray into augmented BI is relatively new, and some reference customers didn’t get a chance
to experience or pointed out gaps in the conversational UI. While the vendor claims no
differences between its on-premises and cloud SaaS offerings, client references point out
some disparity in the report/dashboard authoring experience. Tableau needs to invest in more
connectors, especially with content (solutions) to popular business applications.

TIBCO Spotfire fuses all advanced analytics — data science, geolocation, streaming. TIBCO
Spotfire packs a formidable set of advanced capabilities in a single platform — an impressive
number of complex, highly interactive data visualizations (a differentiator that reference
customers point out); advanced geospatial, graph, and network analytics; and about a dozen
prepackaged ML models. The product also includes Spotfire Data Streams, a highly
differentiated streaming analytics capability that can be set up simply by connecting to a
streaming data source, while most competing platforms require additional integration efforts
to achieve the same capability. The product comes packaged with an AutoML Insights Engine
and an impressive set of ML libraries that data science pros can use to accelerate model
development and training. Spotfire’s NLQ capabilities are top-notch, providing a seamless,
intuitive experience across all data sets. For an extra cost, Spotfire users can enjoy a fully
functional data virtualization platform — Advanced Data Services (ADS) — an appealing option
for applications calling for live queries joining data sets from multiple external databases.
Between ADS and its native streaming capabilities, TIBCO Spotfire is a top choice for real-time
low-latency analytics. Spotfire’s NLG capabilities are basic and template driven. An advantage
of this approach is its full customization capability. The platform could use a boost to its
DevOps functionality, which is limited to exporting and importing Spotfire libraries and is not
easily integrated with popular version-control platforms like Git, since some libraries are
exported in a binary format — a challenge confirmed by customer references.

Domo is a rising star for full-stack BI, translytical, and no-code applications. The
democratization of software development trend started over a decade ago and is now a
runaway locomotive, driven by an ever-increasing number of global and local risk events that
necessitate an agile, adaptive, and resilient approach to software development. Domo is well
positioned to ride this train by empowering business users with a low-code platform to
develop not just read-only but also read/write analytical applications based on its own
database management system, Adrenaline. One of the popular use cases for read/write BI
applications, including data entry, is to compare goals and targets to actuals (a typical
capability of financial planning, but not most BI platforms), which users can also build using the
Domo Goals application. As a bonus, Domo comes packaged with more OOTB connectors to
popular, no-code business applications (many with content) than most direct competitors.
Domo also offers a rich set of augmented BI capabilities, including packaged data science
“tiles” that can be dragged and dropped into Domo’s data pipeline (Magic ETL), guided ML (via
native integration with Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, sold separately), and integration with
Jupyter notebooks for data science pros. The NLG part of Domo’s conversational UI is based
on an OEM of an industry leading NLG provider, Narrative Science. But its NLQ capabilities are
limited to the Buzz (collaboration) feature and are only for data sets based on popular
business applications.

Strong Performers

SAS Visual Analytics clients will benefit from a seamless experience based on SAS Viya. SAS
customers who have already deployed applications based on the SAS Viya platform will enjoy
the familiar
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Reprints of SAS Visual Analytics (VA) and all the other features that VA inherits from
 Viya. SAS draws on its core strength as a provider of advanced analytics software and
packages 45 ML models (more than any other platform evaluated in this research) and an
AutoML tool for SAS VA users. Other advanced features include graph analytics to examine
the paths, direction, and strengths of links between data entities in a network — a capability
still missing in many SQL-/OLAP-based BI platforms. While SAS VA isn’t a full translytical, low-
code app dev platform, it does support data entry via Table Editor, a feature that organizations
will find quite handy to minimize maintaining lists, lookup tables, etc., in spreadsheets. The
NLG component of SAS VA’s conversational UI is comprehensive and used to explain data
characteristics and relationships. But its NLQ leaves room for improvement, as confirmed by
reference customers, being limited to basic search across all information assets, and its NLQ-
based chatbot requires heavy setup (decision flows, typical questions, sample answers, etc.,
based on the template-driven Apache Velocity Project). SAS also needs to beef up VA’s
capabilities for data science professionals, which are limited to calling Viya ML functions from
Jupyter notebooks. Lastly, VA could also use a facelift to modernize its DevOps capabilities
(SAS Studio integrates with Git, but VA does not) and work on adding more connectors and
no-code solutions to popular business applications.

ThoughtSpot continues to enjoy a head start with advanced search-based BI. Many BI vendors
have introduced search-based BI (NLQ), but with varying degrees of success, and this is where
ThoughtSpot still stands out. To be effective, NLQ requires mastery of multiple finely tuned
moving pieces, such as a rich semantic layer and context-based guided questions (as in,
“Would you also like to know…”). NLQ also involves full NLP capabilities to understand
sentence structures and BI-specific constructs like “top 10,” “contains,” or “last quarter,” as well
as type-ahead search to anticipate questions and guide the user to the next relevant question.
Lastly, but importantly, the NLQ engine must support features to help eliminate “noise” or
answers to questions that may be irrelevant and distracting. Turning these capabilities on and
off and determining the index refresh rate (to minimize compute cycles) is a fine balancing act,
and ThoughtSpot’s SearchIQ NLQ engine gets it just right. The platform’s NLG, part of its
SpotIQ augmented BI capabilities, is also very comprehensive and will appeal to global clients,
as both NLQ and NLG features are available in 20 languages — more than most other
platforms evaluated in this research. While ThoughtSpot’s search-based BI model appeals to
many enterprise clients and serves multiple use cases, organizations should not consider
ThoughtSpot as a complete replacement for an enterprise BI platform. The platform lacks
enterprise reporting capabilities, provides only a basic set of data visualizations, and does not
offer integrated tools for data science professionals. The vendor also needs to beef up its
DevOps capabilities, a gap that reference customers highlighted, and add more connectors
and no-code solutions to popular business applications.

SAP Analytics Cloud delivers seamless BI and planning analytics experience. When you start
using SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), you know right away that it was designed with seamlessly
integrated financial planning functionality in mind — a differentiation called out by customer
references. Not too many competing BI products offer instant actual vs. forecast comparisons,
what-if capability (e.g., “What if I add 10% to costs”), budget scenarios, and versions. SAC’s
augmented BI functionality is based on Smart Insights (influencers, trends, variance,
forecasting) and Smart Predict and Smart Discovery (an AutoML capability to make predictions
and identify anomalies). The platform also offers Search to Insight, a rich NLQ functionality, and
its Smart Insights and Smart Discovery components are infused with NLG augmented insights.
Since Forrester’s last evaluation, SAP has beefed up SAC’s core enterprise BI capabilities with
new enterprise reporting features, and it can now be considered and deployed as a fully
featured enterprise BI platform. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) users will also appreciate a
new add-on: an SAC version of a popular, formerly Excel-based Business Explorer (BEx)
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 analyzer tool used to build BW queries. For more advanced data science capabilities, such as
integration with external ML models or with Jupyter notebooks, organizations will have to
procure separate platforms not evaluated in this research — SAP HANA and SAP Data
Intelligence. While SAC is a clear choice for customers of SAP business applications and SAP
BW (as SAP data is complex and challenging to integrate using non-SAP tools), as well as for
enterprises looking to unify SAP and non-SAP data, organizations mostly looking to integrate
and analyze data from non-SAP applications should consider other enterprise BI platforms.

Google Looker lets you build BI applications just like any other modern app dev platform.
Enterprise BI has gone full circle, from having IT pros develop most of the BI applications
(reports and dashboards), to end-user self-service, and most recently back to IT reining in
some control to develop large, complex, distributed, and mission-critical BI applications. This is
one of Looker’s main strengths that addresses a key limitation of legacy BI platforms (including
those catering to end users): a monolithic, tightly coupled architecture that did not lend itself
to DevOps best practices that IT pros are accustomed to. DevOps pros will appreciate
Looker’s tight integration with Git, the most popular SDLC platform, including automatically
synchronizing application versions. The platform also includes built-in quality checks (data
ranges, etc.) when changing versions — essentially, unit testing functionality that’s natively
available in LookML, Looker’s semantic layer. LookML appeals to DevOps pros (accolades
confirmed by customer references) but comes with a cost — it’s an extra layer that may be
required to build most enterprise applications other than simple, quick prototypes. Don’t just
consider Looker for your DevOps pros; the platform has all of the bells and whistles to
compete with end-user self-service-focused BI platforms. Looker’s augmented BI capabilities
are also advanced but currently limited to leveraging Google BigQuery ML, which is the rare
instance where Google’s promise to maintain Looker as an independent BI platform falls short.
Looker’s NLQ functionality, Ask Looker, is robust, but it only works at a specific data set level,
and Looker is working on plans to introduce native NLG capabilities, a current gap that
customer references mention.

Yellowfin continues to shine with one of the best automated data storytelling capabilities.
Yellowfin’s data-storytelling-focused augmented BI comes in two flavors. The first is Assisted
Insights, where ML algorithms run through a list of possible scenarios and display the most
“interesting” ones, where “interesting” is based on statistical significance, the strength of
relationship, and other advanced analytics. Assisted Insights then presents these insights via
NLG alongside autogenerated visualizations. Insights vary appropriately depending on where
they were triggered from — a single data set, a specific dashboard, or in data discovery or
across an entire data model. The second flavor comes from Signals, Yellowfin’s anticipatory
analytics. Unlike competitive platforms where users must proactively set up alerts and triggers,
Signals runs continuously in the background, using statistical analysis and ML models to
explore and identify outliers in spikes, drops, changes in trend direction, new/lost attributes,
changes in volatility, changes in aggregate, step changes, and automated seasonality
detection. While the NLG component of Yellowfin’s conversational UI is outstanding, the NLQ
part is subpar, mostly limited to a guided/prompted way to generate a query to build a report
or a dashboard, though Yellowfin plans a major NLQ functionality overhaul later in the year. To
provide more appeal to business buyers, Yellowfin also needs to package more OOTB
solutions based on popular business applications.

IBM Cognos evolves as a core component in IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Clients looking for a
complete data and analytic platform beyond just BI should consider IBM Cloud Pak for Data. In
addition to Cognos Analytics, the platform comes with all the pre-integrated data
management, data science, and data automation tools your organization may require. The
platform is fully containerized, and clients can deploy it anywhere. Clients looking to deploy
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 just Cognos Analytics will find that it’s still a seasoned enterprise BI platform with advanced
enterprise reporting capabilities. The platform’s augmented BI capabilities include about a
dozen OOTB ML models, including forecasting and what-if analysis, as well as a handy
network graph to analyze relationships among pairs of fields. Cognos Analytics’
conversational UI comes in the form of AI Assistant (a rebranded Watson Insights) with robust
NLQ and NLG capabilities. Data scientists will also appreciate capabilities to import projects
from Watson Studio (part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data) and author Python code right in Cognos
in a notebook-like experience. The Cognos Analytics platform lacks AutoML; that functionality
comes from the separately sold Watson Studio. Its NLQ is data set specific but will
conveniently recommend other relevant data sources as part of an answer to the query.
Cognos Analytics’ NLG narratives provide plenty of useful insights but are not customizable.
DevOps pros will need to purchase a separate platform for robust version control. Cognos
Analytics is a clear choice for IBM Cloud Pack for Data customers, who will save time not
having to integrate multiple components of a complete data and analytics solution; however,
non-IBM customers have plenty of other options to find more features to address their
organization’s BI requirements elsewhere.

Qlik still stands apart with its highly differentiated associative engine platform. Addressing the
“you don’t know what you don’t know” remains challenging for most BI platforms, and this is
where the Qlik Associative Engine continues to stand apart from the competition. While other
search-based BI platforms provide guided analysis and data exploration mostly relying on
structures and constraints dictated by the semantic layer, Qlik Sense search is purely based on
data values and relationships. As a user starts typing or points and selects data points on a
visualization, the Qlik Associative Engine performs logical inference to determine the included
and excluded set of values, highlights these for the user, and as a result supports almost
unrestricted data exploration. Additionally, Qlik Sense also offers a more characteristic
conversational UI — guided NLQ and NLG via Insight Advisor. Enterprises considering Qlik
Sense as their main BI platform will appreciate its advanced and comprehensive enterprise
reporting functionality via the NPrinting module. Qlik Sense’s NLG capabilities are quite basic
and limited to the Insight Advisor interactions. There’s also an inconsistent experience
between search-based associative data exploration and more guided Insight Advisor’s NLQ
functionality. Qlik has not invested significantly in functionality for data science professionals (a
gap confirmed by customer references) beyond API-based integration with external data
science platforms. DevOps pros will also need to find ways to improve on Qlik’s native basic
version control and outdated Git integration based on a script/command line interface (CLI), a
challenge confirmed by customer references.

Contenders

AWS QuickSight is muscling in on market leaders and is a solid choice for AWS clients. As
more organizations move more data to AWS, they naturally ask whether they can use an AWS-
native BI platform to minimize data movement and replication and leverage other relevant
AWS services (the latter called out as an advantage by customer references). The answer is a
partial yes. QuickSight packages a few OOTB ML models for business users to identify
anomalies and influencers on a metric. Data scientists will like QuickSight’s integration with
Amazon SageMaker (a separately sold product). Its augmented BI capabilities come in a form
of Q, its neural-network-trained NLQ feature. QuickSight also offers an NLG capability that is
template based and customizable. QuickSight is as modern a BI platform as it gets, with
natively architected microservices, serverless computing, and a uniquely offered pay-per-use
model (a scalable pay model called out as a differentiator by reference customers). AWS
customers looking for a baseline augmented BI platform will find most of the features they
need in QuickSight. Organizations looking for richer functionality — including advanced
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 enterprise reporting, geospatial analytics, and a guided/AutoML capability for citizen data
scientists — or that plan to deploy most of their data assets on other public cloud platforms
should consider alternatives to QuickSight.

MicroStrategy aspires and is well positioned to be your enterprise BI fabric. It takes guts for a
BI vendor to invest in integration with competitors. But the reality is that a majority of
enterprises have several BI platforms, and MicroStrategy is well positioned to let its customers
have their cake and eat it, too. Organizations can leverage all the effort they invested in
building out a comprehensive MicroStrategy semantic layer and plug their data visualization
platform of choice into it. In this example of what Forrester calls BI fabric, business users get to
keep their favorite data visualization apps while technology, data, and analytics leaders get a
centralized data catalog/semantic layer for governance. MicroStrategy also leads in another
aspect of BI fabric — BI anywhere. In a nutshell, the HyperIntelligence product is a browser
plug-in. When a user looks at anything in a browser, such as a productivity or business app or
a website, all words indexed by MicroStrategy are hyperlinked. Hover over a hyperlink, and a
MicroStrategy mini dashboard — a HyperCard — with relevant data points and analytics pops
up. Where MicroStrategy leads in BI fabric, it lags the competition in augmented BI. While
MicroStrategy’s integration with RStudio and Jupyter notebooks will appeal to data science
pros, it doesn’t offer a native AutoML functionality, and ML models packaged with the platform
are mostly available via calculated variables. Its NLQ capabilities are robust but specific to
each “Dossier” — MicroStrategy’s term for logically grouped applications — while at the portal
level it’s back to simple keyword search. MicroStrategy only offers NLG via a partnership with
one of the NLG leaders, ArriaNLG, a separately sold product.

Evaluation Overview
We evaluated vendors against 15 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:

Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic
indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions are core and
augmented BI capabilities, architecture, DevOps, and enterprise features like governance and
collaboration.

Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies. We
evaluated each vendor’s execution, performance, planned enhancements, innovation, and
partnership ecosystem.

Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence
scores reflect each vendor’s revenue from the augmented BI platform product licenses and
subscriptions.

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Forrester included 15 vendors in the assessment: Amazon Web Services, Domo, Google, IBM,
Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Qlik, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, Sisense, ThoughtSpot, TIBCO
Software, and Yellowfin. Each of these vendors has:

A general-purpose, standalone enterprise BI platform. We included only general-purpose BI

platforms that can be used to build and deploy any BI application. These must also be
standalone BI platforms not embedded in any transactional, operational, or domain-focused
enterprise business applications.

An enterprise BI platform with augmented BI capabilities. We included only platforms that

come packaged out of the box with 1) native augmented BI capabilities, such as “single-click”
advanced functions (anomaly detection, top influencers on a metric, etc.); and 2)
conversational
About Forrester UI (NLQ and NLG).
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 A BI platform that mainly targets business users, not just data or analytics pros. We included
only platforms that don’t require users to have any professional data or analytics skills.

Significant market presence and mindshare with Forrester clients. Included vendors must
show $20 million or more in revenues from the BI product, as demonstrated by Forrester’s
“Now Tech: Augmented BI Platforms, Q2 2021” report. The platform must have significant
presence in enterprises and large enterprises, as well as in large deployments (1,000+ users).
Additionally, Forrester clients must often discuss the evaluated platforms during inquiries and
interviews.

Supplemental Material
Online Resource
We publish all our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking the link at the
beginning of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and default weightings to serve
only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a technology
marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester follows The Forrester
Wave™ Methodology Guide to evaluate participating vendors.

In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for the
evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the inclusion criteria.
We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos/briefings,
and customer reference surveys/interviews. We use those inputs, along with the analyst’s
experience and expertise in the marketplace, to score vendors, using a relative rating system that
compares each vendor against the others in the evaluation.

We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of each
Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester Wave using
materials they provided to us by June 7, 2021, and did not allow additional information after that
point. We encourage readers to evaluate how the market and vendor offerings change over time.

In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And New Wave™ Vendor Review Policy, Forrester asks
vendors to review our findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy. Vendors marked as
nonparticipating vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our defined inclusion criteria but
declined to participate in or contributed only partially to the evaluation. We score these vendors in
accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And The Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And
Incomplete Participation Vendor Policy and publish their positioning along with those of the
participating vendors.

Integrity Policy
We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with the Integrity
Policy posted on our website.

Survey Methodology
The Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Data And Analytics Survey, 2020, was fielded in
March and April 2020. This online survey included 3,399 respondents in Australia, Canada, China,
France, Germany, India, the UK, and the US from companies with 100 or more employees.

Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics ensures that the final survey population contains only
those with significant involvement in the planning, funding, and purchasing of business and
technology products and services. Dynata fielded this survey on behalf of Forrester. Survey
respondent incentives included points redeemable for gift certificates.
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 Please note that the brand questions included in this survey should not be used to measure market
share. The purpose of Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics brand questions is to show
usage of a brand by a specific target audience at one point in time

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