PCMag’s Business Choice Awards 2014 have covered a lot of tools and software that companies can use to better their business efforts, including their recent list of the best business intelligence tools.
PCMag has written reviews of lab-tested products for 25 years and annually conducts a Reader’s Choice survey seeking feedback on hardware, software and services. Using the Reader’s Choice Awards as a basis, the Business Choice awards narrows the list to highlight the programs that readers use at work or in business settings.
Surveys were emailed to PCMag subscribers of the reader’s survey. Responses were received from June 16 through July 14.
Four companies received enough responses to be included in this year’s survey. They were IBM Cognos, Microsoft BI, Oracle and SAP BusinessObjects. Respondents were asked to rate overall satisfaction, reliability and technical support for products and services on a scale of 1 to 10.
Overall IBM Cognos scored 7.2 out of 10 on overall satisfaction, followed by Microsoft BI at 6.7, Oracle at 6.6, and SAP BusinessObjects at 6.4. On reliability, IBM and Oracle were almost even with 7.2 and 7.1, respectively. SAP was at the bottom at 6.8.
Microsoft won in technical support category with only 15% of its customers requesting support. IBM and Oracle had 21% and 24% customer support requests and SAP ended up with 30% of customers needing support.
SAP had the lowest score in all categories.
Business intelligence tools are the software and services that gather vast amounts of raw data and translate it into meaningful information that can impact the operational, strategic or customer planning decisions for a business. This includes spreadsheets, reports, visual analytics, data mining or decision engineering.
Investing in business intelligence software is a big decision, so PCMag’s Business Choice Awards 2014 can help businesses learn about what tools other companies are having success with.
The survey asked if there were any companies whose BI tools they’d put in a good word for if asked for a recommendation. The big surprise? None of the four in the survey passed muster on the Net Promoter Score though just why isn’t clear, according to the PCMag article published July 22.
One factor suggested by the article is advertising over-sell. None of the products can live up to company hype and that leaves customers unhappy.
Finding a high-quality business intelligence program is important to a lot of businesses, however. Sixty-seven percent of respondents want to improve their businesses using advanced analytics, according to the 2014 Analytics, BI, and Information Management Survey by InformationWeek.
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