2014 Business Intelligence Benchmark: Gleanster Research Findings and BI Vendor Landscape

On June 3, 2014, Gleanster Research published its 2014 Gleansight Benchmark Report on Business Intelligence, a 46-page study based on the experiences and ratings of 238 organizations evaluating 45 business intelligence vendor solutions. This article restores the historical intent, methodology, and findings of that report as a research retrospective — every statistic below is dated 2014 Gleanster research, not a description of today's BI market.

Executive Summary

Gleanster's 2014 Business Intelligence Benchmark reported on how 238 organizations were evaluating and using BI technology, rating 45 vendor solutions across four dimensions: overall value, features and functionality, ease of use, and ease of deployment. The report examined what distinguished Top Performers from other respondents in their BI adoption and best practices, and it discussed emerging trends the analysts believed would shape business intelligence going into 2015. A companion FLASH-style vendor scorecard let respondents rate the specific solution they used, and several vendors publicly cited their own results after the report's June 2014 release.

Background of the 2014 Benchmark

By 2014, business intelligence software was shifting from IT-owned enterprise reporting toward more self-service analytics used directly by business teams. Gleanster's benchmark arrived at a point when buyers were choosing among a large and fragmented field of BI vendors, ranging from established enterprise platforms to newer, more agile analytics and dashboard providers. The report's stated purpose was to give buyers a comprehensive guide for evaluating BI investments and for identifying incremental improvements to BI programs already in place, based on what Top Performing organizations were actually doing differently.

Research Methodology

The 2014 Business Intelligence Gleansight Benchmark drew on the experiences and ratings of 238 organizations, covering 45 BI vendor solutions in use across that sample. Respondents evaluated the specific BI solution they used across four criteria — overall value, features and functionality, ease of use, and ease of deployment — consistent with the FLASH-style, end-user-rated scoring format Gleanster used across its Gleansight research line in the same period. The published report ran 46 pages and combined this vendor-rating data with analyst commentary on what separated Top Performers from other respondents.

Historical-accuracy note: the exact Top Performer scoring formula, industry mix, and company-size breakdown of the 238-organization sample are not confirmed in surviving public material and are not reproduced here. This retrospective reports only what can be verified from Gleanster's June 2014 release and corroborating vendor and press citations.

Top Performer Characteristics

Gleanster's research consistently used a "Top Performer" designation to separate organizations reporting the strongest business outcomes from the rest of the survey sample, then examined what those organizations did differently with the technology in question. For the 2014 BI benchmark, one of the clearest reported gaps between the two groups concerned how organizations viewed BI's strategic value.

That gap suggests Top Performers were not simply using more BI features — they had reached a different level of conviction about what the technology was for. Gleanster's report framed this alongside its broader coverage of implementation drivers, meaning the reasons an organization initially adopted BI technology were treated as connected to how much strategic value that organization ultimately reported getting from it.

BI Analytics, Reporting, and Dashboards

Consistent with the BI category generally in 2014, the benchmark's scope centered on how organizations used analytics and reporting tools to support decision-making — querying data, building reports, and visualizing results through dashboards. The report's emphasis on "features and functionality" as one of its four core evaluation dimensions reflected how central dashboard and visualization capability had become to how buyers judged BI platforms, alongside more traditional reporting and query functionality.

The Four Evaluation Dimensions

Every vendor solution rated in the 2014 benchmark was scored by its own users across the same four dimensions:

• Overall value — the respondent's overall assessment of value received relative to cost.
• Features and functionality — the breadth and depth of reporting, analytics, and dashboard capability.
• Ease of use — how accessible the solution was for its actual day-to-day users.
• Ease of deployment — how straightforward implementation and rollout were reported to be.

This structure meant a vendor could score well on functionality while scoring poorly on usability or deployment, and Gleanster's format was designed to surface that kind of trade-off rather than collapse everything into a single composite score.

Historical Vendor Landscape

The 2014 report rated 45 BI vendor solutions in total. InetSoft is one vendor independently confirmed, through its own contemporaneous press materials, to have been included and to have publicly cited its results: InetSoft reported ranking in the top 5 for overall value and for features and functionality, and in the top 10 for ease of use and ease of deployment. Because InetSoft's figures come from the vendor's own press release rather than a recovered copy of Gleanster's full ranking table, they should be read as one confirmed data point about the 2014 rankings rather than a complete picture of how all 45 vendors placed.

This vendor information describes 2014 market participants only. The BI and analytics vendor landscape changed substantially after 2014 through acquisitions, platform consolidation, and the rise of newer self-service and embedded-analytics vendors. Nothing in this section should be read as a description of any vendor's current product, ranking, or market position.

Emerging BI Trends Identified at the Time

Beyond the vendor ratings, Gleanster's 2014 report discussed trends the analysts believed would shape business intelligence going into 2015 and beyond, positioned as forward-looking commentary rather than survey statistics. The specific list of trends is not fully recoverable from surviving public material, so this retrospective does not reproduce a trend list that cannot be verified against the original report. What is confirmed is that the report explicitly framed BI as an evolving category, not a mature, static one — consistent with the industry's actual trajectory toward more self-service, cloud-delivered, and embedded analytics in the years that followed.

What Has Changed Since 2014?

Business intelligence changed substantially in the years after Gleanster's 2014 benchmark. Self-service analytics, where business users build their own reports and dashboards without heavy IT involvement, moved from a differentiator to a baseline expectation. Cloud-delivered BI became the default deployment model for most new purchases, reducing the deployment-time gaps the 2014 report's "ease of deployment" dimension was designed to measure. Embedded analytics — BI capability built directly into other business applications rather than accessed as a standalone tool — also grew substantially, and augmented analytics using machine learning to surface insights automatically became a mainstream feature well after 2014. None of these later developments should be read back into the 2014 findings above — they are included here only to separate the historical research from the current market.

Lessons That Remain Relevant Today

Several themes from Gleanster's 2014 BI research have held up better than the specific vendor landscape it described. The gap between Top Performers and other organizations in how much strategic value they attributed to BI — 78% versus 34% in the 2014 data — still tracks a pattern that recurs across newer generations of analytics and AI tooling: organizations that treat a technology as core to decision-making tend to report more value from it than organizations that treat the same technology as a reporting utility. The report's four-dimension evaluation structure, separating overall value from usability and deployment experience, also anticipated a more general shift toward evaluating enterprise software on real-world usability rather than feature checklists alone.

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