Business Intelligence Survey

by David Custódio

Some weeks ago we decided to know a little better our customers’ preferences by doing a small survey. Since at the time most of our subscribers were from Portugal we decided to focus on the Portuguese users. The results were very useful and they had an impact on the baseline we set to the beta version of Viur. Because we like to share here goes the results.

User typology

From these two charts, we can see our main targets are the managers and developers from Small and Medium Businesses. It came as a surprise the high percentage of developers, but that can be explained because they are more prone to be early adopters.

Databases and Cloud Services

In the database and cloud services usage charts there are also some interesting facts. PostgreSQL were one of our top priorities since it’s one of the most powerful database engines and its free! On the other side SQL Server is the most popular and unsurprisingly and confirming our guess, there are still a lot of people using Excel as a database. On the other side, Google Analytics won but a large percentage of users not using any cloud service at all.   

BI tools

It seems Excel is still the king of BI, followed by the BI capabilities that some ERPs give. Still there are plenty of people not using BI tools or rolling their own.

Most wanted features

In this chapter, it was very balanced but the dashboards won followed closely by Real Time and Data Exploration.

Also, 46% of the responders said it was very important to have a mobile support and 58% wanted to have access to the platform outside the company.

Conclusions

We reaffirmed that our target users are the SMB managers, but we can’t forget the developers.

With the database and cloud results, we decided to include MySQL support in the beta version while leaving Mailchimp for now. So for the beta we will support SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Google Analytics.

The BI tools results confirmed our theory that there are a lot of people out there still using Excel to do Business Intelligence. For these people (and many others, of course!) Viur will be great since it will allow them to save a huge amount of time - and money!

Featurewise, we are covering the user preferences so that's good!

 

Stay tuned, fresh news are coming soon.