SAP
SAP's Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions seeks to help all users, from the high-end analyst to the casual business user, according to the company's Web site. They can leverage business intelligence solutions to access information they need – with minimal dependence on IT resources and developers, the company says.

SAP Business Objects business intelligence solutions for the enterprise will enable  reporting, interactive analysis, advanced analysis, dashboards and visualisation, data exploration and information infrastructure, according to the site.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

IBM
The company has a well-integrated BI platform architecture, research firm Gartner said in its January report Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. IBM Cognos 8 remains much better integrated than most competing offerings, with shared metadata across the platform enabling ease of transfer from report to query to analysis, Gartner said. The benefit of this architectural consistency was evident in the survey results, with IBM Cognos customers reporting that they need only three administration staff per thousand users on average.

IBM Cognos has a high proportion of enterprise wide, enterprise-standard BI platform deployments — almost three-quarters of the IBM customers Gartner contacted as part of this research consider its products a BI standard in their organisation, according to the report.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

ORACLE
Oracle has established the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform as the "BI standard" in 82 percent of the references that responded to its Magic Quadrant survey. Oracle also has the widest range of BI platform capabilities employed the researcher said.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

SAS
Privately-held SAS's approach to BI continues to focus on the more advanced technologies, such as forecasting, predictive modeling and optimisation, and embedding them into cross-functional and industry specific analytical applications, according to the Gartner report. SAS remains the most widely known analytics and data mining vendor and its customers use data mining or predictive modeling extensively. Although SAS focuses on advanced technologies, survey data suggests that its customers use a broad range of SAS BI capabilities, Gartner says.

By reaching agreements with database management system vendors, such as Teradata, Netezza, IBM, HP, Aster Data and Greenplum, by which the SAS scoring engine runs natively within the hosting database management system (DBMS), SAS expands the reach of its analytic capabilities into non-SAS clients' infrastructure, says the report.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

SNAPSHOT

• Customers: More than 45,000 business, government and university sites inn 123 Countries
• SAS Customers or their Affiliates Represent 93 of the top 100 companies on the 2010 FORTUNE Global 500 list
• Employees
• 11,398 total employees
• Financial

2009 Revenue: $2.31 billion

• Reinvestment in R&D

2009 R&D investment: 23 percent of revenue

• Web site: www.sas.com

MICROSOFT
Microsoft's clever combination of Exel, SQL and SharePoint more or less guarantees the continued adoption of its BI software, especially among Microsoft-centric enterprises, Gartner said in its report.

The maker of Windows 7 operating system has also a new version of PUSHBI coming out at the end of October that will support seven devices including Windows 6.5, Windows 7.0, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Android and Symbian.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

MICROSTRATEGY
The company is a business intelligence technology provider, covering integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that enables companies to analyse the data stored across their enterprise to make better business decisions, according to MicroStrategy's Web site. MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform delivers actionable information to business users via e-mail, web, and mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry. The MicroStrategy Mobile Suite, is a software package that allows companies to build mobile business intelligence applications at no cost, the company said in a statement on its Web site.

MicroStrategy Mobile enables companies to quickly and easily extend graphs, grids, enterprise reports, and information dashboards to the iPhone and iPad. With MicroStrategy Mobile, there is no coding or app design experience required. Using a point-and-click interface, mobile BI applications can be built using an intuitive array of iPhone and iPad-optimised displays and controls, according to the company.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

ACTUATE
Actuate founded and co-leads the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) open source project. BIRT is the premier development environment to present data visualisations in compelling ways via the web on any device, the company says on its Web site. Actuate products add interactivity, dashboards, analytics, and deployment options for web and mobile applications, according to the site.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Niche Player

SNAPSHOT

• Revenue

Q2 2010: $30.3 million
FY09: $119.3 million

• Employees

570 Worldwide (as of June 30, 2010)

• Customers

4,600

• Stock, Listing

ACTU, NASDAQ NM

• Location: San Mateo, California

• Web site: www.actuate.com

QLIKTECH
QlikTech Inc.'s flagship QlikView business intelligence solution is used by more than 15,000 customers and more than 570,000 users in more than 100 countries, according to its Web site. Its software platform, QlikView, com-bines enterprise-class analytic and search functionality with the simplicity and ease-of-use found in office productivity software tools for a broad set of business users, the company says.

QlikView enables users to consolidate large, disparate data sets and discover relationships within data in real time when requested by the user. QlikView also visualises this data in a simple, intuitive user interface that enables users to interactively explore and analyse information, according to the company.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Challenger

SNAPSHOT

• Revenue

Q2 2010: $51.1 million

• Employees

650

• Customers

15,000

• Stock, Listing

QLIK, NASDAQ

• Location

Founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993; Headquartered in Radnor, PA, USA

• Web site: www.qlikview.com

JASPERSOFT
Leveraging a commercial open source business model, Jaspersoft provides end-to-end BI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of other vendors, the company says on its Web site. The BI suite includes pixel-perfect enterprise reporting, ad-hoc query, dashboards, OLAP and in-memory analysis, and data integration. Jaspersoft is the only BI vendor that enables companies to adapt to the new, virtualised world by providing a complete spectrum of on-premise, multi-tenant SaaS and cloud-based deployment options for both embedded and standalone business intelligence, according to the site.

SNAPSHOT

• Downloads

11 million

• Production Deployments

160,000

• Customers

13,000

• Stock, Listing

Privately Held

• Location

Headquartered at San Francisco, California, U.S.

• Web site: www.jaspersoft.com

INFORMATION BUILDERS
Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years, according to the company's Web site. The company's WebFOCUS business intelligence platform helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management,business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Leader

PENTAHO
Pentaho Corporation says on its Web site, it provides a comprehensive BI suite that includes capabilities for data integration/ETL, modeling, data mining, analysis, reporting and dashboards. The suite supports the company’s Agile BI initiative, which enables organisations to build BI applications more quickly, respond to business changes more easily and expedite time-to-value for up to 90 percent less cost than traditional BI vendors, according to the site.

Pentaho uses a subscription model, eliminating software license fees and providing support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription, according to information available on wikipedia.org.

TIBCO
TIBCO Software says its Silver Spotfre – a fully functional on-demand offering designed to enable anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports for business analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

The company says it is the first provider to truly make good on making BI and analytics available to anyone. TIBCO Silver Spotfre enables visual analytics and interactive dashboards to be created and published to the cloud in minutes without requiring time consuming setup or infrastructure, according to a statement on its Web site.
Gartner Magic Quardrant Position: Challenger