BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey 21, The Voice of the BI & Analytics Community

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Spoiler alert! With 19 top rankings and 21 leading positions this year, SAP Analytics Cloud once again achieves an outstanding set of results in this year’s survey.

BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey 21 issued on October 27. You can download the highlights report and read all headline results for SAP Cloud Analytics here (registration might be required).

Rebranding The BI Survey to The BI & Analytics Survey

BARC has decided to rename The BI Survey to The BI & Analytics Survey this year. They recognize that the time has come to reflect changing customer requirements as well as the stronger overall role that data and analytics plays today. In practice, this has entailed just a few adjustments to the questionnaire and minor changes to the KPIs they measure.

From March to June 2020, 2,136 people answered a series of detailed questions about their use of a BI and Analytics product. This year the survey offers a comparison of 33 leading BI and analytics tools across 36 KPIs including customer satisfaction, innovation, cloud BI, and project success.

Top Findings

Here are top findings for SAP Analytics Cloud in The BI & Analytics Survey 21:

• 93% of surveyed users would recommend SAP Analytics Cloud. This is very consistent with the 97% achievement in last year’s survey 2019. Survey demographics indicate an impressive mean deployment of 1,365 users. Also, survey results show that typical tasks carried out with SAP Analytics Cloud include viewing/navigating data (94%), exploring/analyzing data (86%) and creating reports (73 %), which demonstrates the feature-richness of the product.


• 93% of surveyed users rate its functionality for creating dashboards as good or excellent. Survey data clearly shows that analytical use cases such as dashboards/scorecards are frequently implemented by SAP Analytics Cloud customers (77%) and BARC analysts note that the product’s dashboard functionality is praised by customers with a highlight of SAP Analytics Cloud, analytics designer, that was introduced in 2019 to enable professionals to create centrally governable analytics content, ranging from dashboards and guided analytics to sophisticated planning applications that can be extended via custom widgets and APIs. BARC analysts also note that SAP Analytics Cloud support visual design standards such as the Hichert SUCCESS rules and the International Business Communication Standards (IBCS).


• 86% of surveyed users rate SAP support for SAP Analytics Cloud as good or excellent, compared to the survey average of just 66%. BARC analysts note that SAP listens very carefully to customers’ needs and requirements, constantly improving its software with this information.

19 Top-Rankings and 21 Leading Positions for SAP Analytics Cloud!

Overall, The BI & Analytics Survey 21 continues to show top-rankings and leading positions for SAP Analytics Cloud. This year’s survey shows SAP Analytics Cloud with no less than 19 top-rankings and 21 leading positions. SAP Analytics Cloud achieves top-rankings or leading positions, particularly in the ‘Large international BI vendors’ peer group up against its competitors. Customers rate the product highest for KPIs such as ‘Customer satisfaction,’ ‘Innovation,’ ‘Cloud BI’, and ‘Project success’.

• Customer Satisfaction. ‘Customer satisfaction’ aggregates the ‘Price-to-value’, ‘Recommendation’, ‘Vendor support’, ‘Implementer support’ and ‘Product satisfaction’ KPIs. Excellent results in nearly all KPIs comfortably place SAP Analytics Cloud as a winner for ‘Customer satisfaction’ in the ‘Large international BI vendors’ peer group. The BI & Analytics Survey results confirm that SAP Analytics Cloud is a modern, cloud-based platform that brings together business intelligence, augmented analytics and planning to provide comprehensive functionality for various use cases. Its outstanding vendor and implementer support ratings lead in turn to high product satisfaction and count as major reasons behind the product’s strong recommendation rate. Customer feedback confirms that SAP Analytics Cloud offers good value for money.


• Innovation. ‘High innovative capacity of the vendor’ is an important reason why 45% of respondents chose to buy SAP Analytics Cloud (compared to the survey average of just 16%). Many companies consider SAP Analytics Cloud to be an innovative product, ranking it top for ‘Innovation’ in all its peer groups. Ever since its first feature in The BI & Analytics Survey, SAP Analytics Cloud has been consistently top ranked for ‘Innovation’ in all its peer groups, which is an exceptional result.


• Cloud BI. SAC is ranked best for ‘Cloud BI’ in all its peer groups, consolidating its position from last year. BARC analysts note that SAP Analytics Cloud is designed specifically for the cloud with the additional option of serving hybrid cloud scenarios (e.g., with data on-premises in SAP HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, etc.) without moving, caching or persisting data into the cloud.


• Project Success. Survey results indicates that a high proportion of SAP Analytics Cloud projects have been successful and completed on time and on budget. Implementation can be led by SAP itself or by one of its experienced partners.

Market-leading BI and Analytics Vendor

As a summary, The BI & Analytics Survey states that convincing ratings for the majority of its KPIs consolidate SAP’s position as a global market-leading BI and analytics vendor that is delivering considerable benefits to its customers. BARC analysts confirm that companies can benefit from using SAP Analytics Cloud with faster reporting, planning and analysis, reduced costs, and better business decisions. Many customers highlight the innovative capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud to implement various modern BI and analytics use cases, and 80% of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis and 70% for budgeting and planning in the future.

For more information, please visit The BI Survey website: www.bi-survey.com/product/sap-analytics-cloud