On 20-Feb-2014, Gartner has released magic quadrant for BI tools. Anyone can compare the performance of top BI Vendor with that last year.
We are only interested in QlikView and Business Objects. Two points from these diagrams
QlikView
QlikView was mentioned as one of the best leader. It is very flexible and development cycle is short. This is true in most cases. However, I would like to provide my thought in different aspect.
I have written a post on QlikView review which could be found in BOB forum (link). There may be bias as I always prefer a tool that requires more participation by end-user and less development by IT technicians. Anyone interested may take a look.
The quick notes for QlikView is as follows
Business Objects
We work on our BI reports with Business Objects XIR3 SP3 for several years. It was frequently reported by users that user interface of WEBI reports are poor designed. New users had a hard time to learn the tool while advanced users found it hard to create new reports.
The 4.x version was mentioned to be better now (comparing with magic quadrant in 2013). It is a good news for improvements. However, there is no motivations for us to upgrade our BO environment from 3.1 to 4.x.
In general, we consider the following things before any planning of software upgrade.
- QlikView did well as last year
- SAP improved "ability to execute" in latest BO 4.x version
QlikView
QlikView was mentioned as one of the best leader. It is very flexible and development cycle is short. This is true in most cases. However, I would like to provide my thought in different aspect.
I have written a post on QlikView review which could be found in BOB forum (link). There may be bias as I always prefer a tool that requires more participation by end-user and less development by IT technicians. Anyone interested may take a look.
The quick notes for QlikView is as follows
- Free for desktop Personal Edition with full features EXCEPT deployment.
- A good tool for ad-hoc reporting.
- Works best on small/simple reports.
- Does not require data warehousing design which takes long time to implement.
- Focused on user interaction on end-products (i.e. report). Most works are done by IT developers.
- Provides a lot of flexibility for UI components. The look-n-feel result could easily satisfy different end-users by report customizations.
- Requires (heavy) scripting and so most likely it could only be created by IT technicians.
- No semantic layer for data modeling. Every single QV reports is independent each other.
Business Objects
We work on our BI reports with Business Objects XIR3 SP3 for several years. It was frequently reported by users that user interface of WEBI reports are poor designed. New users had a hard time to learn the tool while advanced users found it hard to create new reports.
The 4.x version was mentioned to be better now (comparing with magic quadrant in 2013). It is a good news for improvements. However, there is no motivations for us to upgrade our BO environment from 3.1 to 4.x.
In general, we consider the following things before any planning of software upgrade.
- End of Life (EOL)
- Stability of new version
- New features that improve user experiences