Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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What technology buyers really want...

Recently I spoke with Doug Laney (formerly an analyst with META Group and now CEO and Chief Research Officer of Evalubase Research) about the results of his company’s latest research results. I found the BI results particularly intriguing.

Evalubase has a very creative and different method for getting technology evaluations. The company surveys a variety of IT professionals throughout our industry continuously about their real-life experiences with solutions. They gather a multitude of hard metrics and several free-form, unstructured comments in each completed evaluation. You, the participant, can choose to evaluate any technology you like whenever you like, and answer any questions you feel qualified to do so.

Since this is an ongoing study of the IT market, you will also find an “aging” algorithm to mitigate the impact of older evaluations. Let’s face it – vendors improve or get worse over time. Therefore, to reduce the undue effects of old evaluations, recent evaluations always count more heavily in the calculation of a metric or rating.

That said – what did they find (as of April 11, 2005)?

1. ERP applications won overall approval in terms of functionality, efficiency and reliability. CRM came in second. BI came in fourth – possibly suffering from vendor hype.

2. For overall ingenuity, Siebel got top honors (though, interestingly, they were last in terms of their credibility…), followed by HP, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. SAP was ranked last in the line up.

3. In terms of overall key buying criteria for enterprise solutions, buyers were fairly consistent in ranking all criteria fairly equally – ease of integration, product performance, and functionality were slightly ahead of maintainability, cost of ownership, vendor reputation, ease of use and scalability.

4. For data management solutions, buyers are far and above interested in the performance and maintainability of these solutions. For data integration solutions, performance and functionality were top dogs with all others, except ease of use (second), distant thirds.

5. For BI solutions specifically, it seems that ease of integration is the runaway winner. Perhaps this explains the acquisition fever in our field these days with vendors scrambling to make their suite of products eventually fully integrated. Cost of ownership and performance were nearby seconds with ease of use, functionality, maintainability, scalability, and vendor reputation running a distant third.

Interesting, don’t you think? All the noise we hear about BI functionality, maintainability, and even scalability don't appear to be as important to the folks buying these products as the vendors think they are. Looks like Evalubase may serve a very important purpose in getting to the real requirements of our marketplace.

If you are interested in putting your two cents worth into their survey, all you need to do is register at their site.

As always -- Yours in BI success,

Claudia

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