Boris Evelson

Yesterday evening, Qualtrics announced that it’s acquiring Clarabridge in an all-stock deal worth $1.125 billion. This is a great move for Qualtrics. In one swoop, it has secured the best-in-class analytics capabilities that will define the future of voice-of-the-customer programs as firms decrease their reliance on surveys and focus instead on understanding customers based on […]

Learn how to balance your need for a hybrid environment with the benefits of an elastic cloud-based BI platform.

The business intelligence (BI) vendor consolidation trend that started earlier in 2019 continues. Today, TIBCO announced its intent to acquire Information Builders, Inc. (IBI) — one of the oldest players in the market. Want to get the real sense of how far back IBI goes? It was one of the first vendors to offer reporting and analytics on mainframes! It still does, and it’s quite a unique capability today, only […]

They say data is the new oil. They say data is the new currency. They say data is the key competitive differentiator. All true. But reality is sobering: Only 7% of firms report advanced, insights-driven practices. Respondents to the same survey claimed that less than half (49%) of all business decisions in their enterprise are […]

Enterprise BI is not dead, It's alive and thriving. But there are changes ahead. Learn about five of them here.

Enterprises have been successfully leveraging analytics platforms such as business intelligence (BI), predictive analytics based on machine learning (PAML), cognitive search, and others for multiple applications and use cases for decades. That has not been the case with text analytics or natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Forrester tracks over a hundred vendors whose platforms are […]

If you set out to build a “boil the ocean” business case for why to invest in data, analytics, and insights initiatives — stop. Use your precious time to instead focus on prioritizing the investment categories across where you are in your business-insights maturity, because they will yield tangible benefits — both top- and bottom-line […]

Forrester has just published 2019 refreshes of our enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform Wave™ evaluations. As the BI market and the technology continue to evolve, so does our research. This year, we emphasized: New market segmentation by both vendor-managed and client-managed platforms, which roughly equate to on-premises and cloud-based platforms, respectively, but not quite. Since […]

The past two years have seen a significant divergence in the maturity of the supply and demand sides of the business intelligence (BI) market. This divergence will influence market dynamics for the next two years and affect enterprise insights leaders making strategic vendor and platform decisions. Specifically, the: Supply side is very mature. BI technology […]

I recently had the privilege (not to mention a lot of fun) to participate in a brainstorming session with a large enterprise software vendor and my esteemed colleagues John Rymer, Rob Koplowitz, and Jeffrey Hammond on the topic of low-code app dev. It’s not a well-known fact (but Forrester has been publicizing it for a […]

The business intelligence (BI) market is going through a round of significant consolidation. Earlier this month, Sisense acquired Periscope Data; last week, Google announced its intention to acquire Looker; and today, Salesforce announced the intention to acquire Tableau Software. A smaller company, Logi Analytics, has also been on an acquisition spree, acquiring Zoomdata today and […]

Information technology keeps moving forward at an ever-increasing pace. Business intelligence (BI) technology isn’t falling behind and keeps constantly evolving. Gone are the days when vendors categorized themselves as: IT-focused and enterprise-scalable vs. business-user-focused BI platforms mostly going after departmental and line of business use cases. All legacy, formerly IT-focused BI vendors have moved squarely […]

Over the last five years, most large enterprises have slowly but surely matured from being data-aware to data-driven. They all collect data from operational and transactional applications; process the data into data lakes, data hubs, data warehouses, and data marts; and build business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications to understand what the data is telling […]

For the past 30-plus years, and for a host of reasons, the age-old connection between creative and media has been severed. In the programmatic era, the focus has been dominantly on media, as though creative didn’t contribute to enticing consumer attention and engagement and driving media performance. The results have been dismal: The digital advertising […]

Struggling to meet the needs of data- and analytics-needs decision makers? There is help out there! Executives across industries recognize their organizations’ need for digital transformation — and the accompanying priority to become insights-driven. For many that’s easier said than done, however. Firms struggle with resource and talent requirements needed to deliver timely insights or to […]

I recently answered a client question regarding an application that could be based on either business intelligence (BI) or text analytics technology. Question: “We receive quarterly and yearly account statements for our investments. Each statement will contain key pieces of information, such as total contributions, expenses, interest income, etc. However, each vendor may format their […]

Qlik, a Leader in our recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation on business intelligence (BI), has acquired Podium Data, a Contender in our big data fabric Wave. In a humble opinion of yours truly, this is further proof of a trend showing that BI buyers are increasingly seeking end-to-end platforms and solutions, rather than separate BI/ETL components that need […]

Enterprises are sitting on mountains of unstructured data — 61% have more than 100 terabytes, and 12% have more than five petabytes! Luckily, there are mature technologies out there that can help. First, enterprise information architects should consider general-purpose text analytics platforms. These are capable of handling most, if not all, text analytics use cases, both […]

I’ve been watching this trend with great curiosity (and first wrote about it in 2008). On the one hand, software product vendors are slowly but surely migrating from just selling products to selling solutions — and solutions always require professional services. IBM led the trend when it acquired PwC Consulting in 2002. For the last few […]