You may remember a few months ago Gartner produced one of their magic quadrant reports on ITSM platforms – something we all read with interest here at Westbury Towers because we were keen to know how HP Service Manager fared against the competitors. We have, after all, hitched our wagon to Service Manager’s train, and the perceived value of Service Manager has a knock-on effect for us.
Fast forward a few months and another Gartner magic quadrant is out and again it’s looking at an area pretty close to Westbury: BI tools.
Our relationship with SAP Business Objects isn’t quite the same as our relationship with HP. After all, we’re an OEM reseller of Business Objects – it’s part and parcel of our Service Management Intelligence Suite product. But our solution is also somewhat platform independent when it comes to the BI tool – if you’re standardized on Cognos, for example, we can work with that, and SMI Suite is still very relevant.
So what’s the upshot from Gartner’s exercise in compare and contrast? Well, on their quadrant’s x-axis (“completeness of vision”), SAP Business Objects falls second only to IBM – quite an achievement in a field of fifteen big players. But on the y-axis (“ability to execute”) Gartner has it seventh – still good, but not as good. Overall this places Business Objects in the “leaders” quadrant.
On a more detailed level, Gartner says that “BusinessObjects’ reporting and ad hoc query capabilities continue to be cited as its top strength by its customers,” and that it provides “leading-edge capabilities, many [of] which complement its BI platform, in the areas of collaboration and decision support, text analytics, in-memory analytics, OnDemand BI (SaaS), search coupled with BI, data integration with lineage and impact analysis, and data quality.”
In the “cautions” column, however, Gartner warns that “customer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any other vendor in our customer survey”
Overall SAP comes out as one of the better, more established players, albeit with some areas to improve on.
Read the full report here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article121/article121.html
Tom
