The Gartner Group, the world's leading global IT research and advisory company, has refreshed its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms for 2014 to reflect the changing demands of the modern business. Yet under these new criteria, Tableau Software, the Space Age Technologies' Business Intelligence (BI) partner of choice, has strengthened its leadership position among the leaders and visionaries of the global BI market.
"We are both pleased and proud to be the SA face of such a leading force in the global BI industry," comments Wayne Prinsloo, Business Intelligence Analyst at Space Age Technologies. "We have seen the power of Tableau both in our own as well as customer environments already, which is why we chose this platform as our BI technology provider, so it's great to see that decision ratified by the company continuing to make waves with its unique blend of far-reaching vision combined with comparatively fuss-free execution."
Although some of the giants of the industry may be rated slightly ahead of Tableau for the completeness of their BI ecosystem, none can compete with it on execution. Even benchmarked against the software giants who primarily service large enterprise customers, names like SAS, SAP, IBM and Microsoft, Tableau has emerged as a leading player in effective BI solutions for the current climate.
It is in part due to the powerful innovations by Tableau in advancing how businesses use BI today that this Magic Quadrant has required updating. The research organisation has moved to place more emphasis on the emerging data exploration and discovery model of BI as championed by the newer vendors, as well as the self-service model, which allows business users to build their own reports through the user-friendly drag-and-drop interface.
Explains the Gartner report itself: "Tableau's highly intuitive, visual-based data discovery, dashboarding, and data mash-up capabilities have transformed business users' expectations about what they can discover in data and share without extensive skills or training with a BI platform."
For 2014, Gartner has deleted three capability definitions from the BI Magic Quadrant analysis:
* Scorecards. Because it discovered that most companies do not implement true scorecard/strategy maps in their BI solutions. They use dashboards instead, with scorecards remaining the preserve of CPM solutions.
* Predictive Analytics, which has now been included in the "Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.
* Prescriptive Analytics, which has now been included in the "Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.
Meanwhile, five capabilities have been added:
* Geospatial and locational intelligence;
* Embedded advanced analytics;
* Business user data mash-up and modelling;
* Embeddable analytics; and
* Support for big data sources.
Adds Elissa Fink on behalf of Tableau Software: "These new capabilities are areas that Tableau has already developed solutions, but where we continue to innovate. We'll keep pushing the envelope, driven by what our customers want and need."
With the Space Age Technologies credo being to empower its customers through technology, this focus by BI vendor Tableau on delivering a solution which places data discovery at the fingertips of the business user has always been a perfect fit. Having this increasingly recognised approach ratified as being of key importance to business today by a global powerhouse such as Gartner has emboldened the team to go further than ever in ensuring technology implementations deliver precisely the value that customers require of them.
Prinsloo concludes: "This year, in addition to our on-premises Tableau solutions, we will also be delivering new cloud-based service models from this leading vendor, another area which the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant has identified as being a core component of future successes. Tableau's cloud solution is already delivering real value and being rapidly evolved through exposure to the crucible that is the real business environment of today."
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Space Age Technologies
Space Age Technologies is an IT services and platform integration specialist and Microsoft Partner. The company specialises in the small and medium business, continually seeking ways to help these companies balance their need to reduce their non-value adding IT costs with finding IT solutions that will help grow their business. Forward-thinking and solutions-oriented, Space Age Technologies is ideally poised to realise its vision of achieving Relevant IT for its customers - ensuring IT becomes a true value add to the business.
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