David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share some insight on BOARD drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated BOARD and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

This Value Index assessed Version 10.3 released in 2018. Most BI products are read only. BOARD is one of a five vendors evaluated that offers a combination of planning and simulation capabilities coupled with interactive discovery, reporting and dashboarding. This combination of capabilities helped BOARD earn an overall ranking of fifth in the Value Index. The product uses an in-memory architecture to support read/write capabilities necessary for planning applications and to enhance performance. The in-memory architecture requires data to be imported into BOARD for analyses. It is available for on-premises deployments or as a cloud-based service.

The company ranked first in Validation with readily available case studies and customer references. BOARD’s product ranked second in Manageability with good capabilities for both IT administration and business administration of its systems. In Usability, BOARD ranked fifth with capabilities targeted to specific personas in both lines of business and IT. In the Capability category it is one of five products in the Value Index to offer robust interactive planning analyses.

However, BOARD could improve its product with more predictive analytics capabilities to complement the driver-based analyses it offers; also, more collaboration capabilities would increase the value of those analyses. BOARD’s lowest ranking is Adaptability where it places ninth. Better APIs and customization capabilities would help improve its score in this category.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about BOARD and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director