The BI Verdict was officially launched in October 2009. However, it brings together content from two existing reports which date back further: The OLAP Report and The BI Survey. The OLAP Report was founded in 1995 by Nigel Pendse and Richard Creeth to counter the prevalence of vendor-sponsored ‘research’ documents and 'white papers'. The BI Survey (then The OLAP Survey) was first published in 2001 as a companion to The OLAP Report. While The OLAP Report presented the opinion of Nigel Pendse and his team on OLAP products, technologies and trends, The BI Survey is an analysis of the results of the world's largest and most-detailed independent survey of BI users, presenting a quantitative, real-world view of the BI market.

The BI Verdict is published by BARC (The Business Application Research Center). BARC is an independent analyst house which specializes in producing vendor-neutral research, analyses, conferences and seminars on a variety of business software markets. Click here to visit the BARC website. The editor, Nigel Pendse, is a highly respected industry expert with more than 30 years experience as a user, vendor and independent consultant in the Business Intelligence industry. Find out more about the analysts.

Our product reviews are prepared following an interview with the vendor in question, involving management, marketing and product development people. This involves seeing and testing the products in action. In some cases, we also install and test the software ourselves. We never review products without at least seeing them in use. We also speak to users, competitors and others to get a more complete view. Vendors can see the reviews of their products before publication, and have an opportunity to correct factual errors then or later, but they have no power of veto over our opinions, conclusions and recommendations. Vendors also cannot pull out at this stage if they do not like the opinions in the review. We also get a lot of valuable feedback from readers, so that errors can be corrected quickly on the Web site, one of the other advantages of online publication. Feedback comes from product users, consultants, vendors and even students.

The Customer Verdicts and KPI Dashboards are both based on the results of The BI Survey, our annual survey of BI software users from around the world (mainly North America and Western Europe). The survey regularly attracts around 2,000 responses and enables us to draw statistically sound conclusions and comparisons between the leading BI products.

Instead of the vendor-sponsorship and advertising model that many other analysts use, our revenues are derived entirely from subscriptions. We believe strongly that the best way to preserve The BI Verdict’s independence, and its commitment to providing the best information for business intelligence buyers rather than sellers, is for those same buyers to provide the funding. This may make it seem relatively more expensive than sponsored sites, but the extra cost is well worth it for buyers, who are guaranteed impartial material that is designed to help them get the most from their far larger BI software, hardware and consultancy investment.

This commitment to independence means that The BI Verdict is entirely funded by subscription, and the rates have to reflect it.

Conversely, if vendors provide free reprints of other analyst research, you should enquire about whether the research was sponsored by the vendor, rather than simply reprinted after publication. In other words, was the ‘analysis’ originally commissioned and paid for by the vendor’s marketing department, or did the vendor pay to reprint independently produced research that merely happened to be favorable? Both types exist, though most vendor-distributed or downloadable reprints from free sites are actually of vendor-funded ‘research’ (which is really no more than disguised marketing material), and it’s worth finding out which is which before reading it.

The BI Verdict is available for workgroup usage. Subscriptions are listed in US dollars, but can be paid in Euros or £ GBP. Discounts are available for larger groups and on renewal. Full-subscribers get on-line access to the equivalent of over 1000 printed pages, many of which will be updated during their period of subscription. There is also an entry-level subscription, The BI Market Guide, which enables access to selected content aimed to help get your BI project up-and-running in the right direction. Click here for pricing information.

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A small proportion of The BI Verdict is available without subscribing or even registering. This material does not include any of the detailed product reviews or positioning analyses. The reason for providing it is to allow non-subscribers to get some value from the site and to get a feel for the style, quality and depth of the overall site. There are no restrictions on linking to these pages from other sites.

Yes, you can click here to access a small subset of the subscriber-only material. This lets you assess the style and level of detail provided, though in some cases, the preview material is older than that available to subscribers.

Click here for a full list of the business intelligence products that we evaluate.

The site is designed to be browser-neutral so can be accessed via a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

The BI Verdict is in English-only. However, German speakers can contact our office in Germany to discuss how we can help with your BI project. Visit http://www.barc.de for more information.

No, The BI Verdict is not aimed at the many people who have just heard of BI and want a basic introduction to the topic. There are many other sites on the Web (typically from consultants and vendors) that provide this function, and there are also books available. The BI Verdict is aimed at organizations with a professional interest in BI (buying or selling BI products, implementing BI applications or investing in BI vendors), and they are assumed to already have a basic knowledge of the concept.

If you purchase the full subscription to The BI Verdict, you gain access to a good deal of information based on the findings of the most recent BI Survey. The KPI Dashboards and Customer Verdicts sections are both based on results from The BI Survey. These sections are provided in dashboard format, designed to give subscribers a quick and revealing overview of how the leading BI products compare against each other across a number of key criteria. Subscribers also have access to a summary of the key findings from the latest edition of The BI Survey. The majority of the findings, commentary and analysis from The BI Survey is only available if you purchase the full 400+ page report. Visit The BI Survey Web site to find out more.

The BI Survey is an annual report based on the world's largest independent survey of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) users. Now in its eighth edition, author Nigel Pendse delivers the results of the survey in easy-to-read chart format alongside his own incisive commentary. The survey regularly attracts responses from around 2,000 BI software users worldwide. Unlike most other published surveys, The BI Survey is completely vendor-independent. This means that no vendor had any influence over the questions asked in the survey, or over how the responses were analyzed and presented.

A full subscription to The BI Verdict includes access to a summary of the key findings from the latest edition of The BI Survey.

The survey regularly attracts responses from around 2,000 BI software users worldwide. The eighth edition had 2,622 detailed responses. The BI Survey also contains many analyses of trends based on current and previous surveys, taking into account over 15,000 responses in the last few years.

Yes. The contents can be found on The BI Verdict Content page.