BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS
CISCO APPDYNAMICS
WINNER: OVERALL
Cisco Systems has reported a dramatic increase in business through the channel for its AppDynamics monitoring software, even as the company has continued to enhance the software with new capabilities including increased visibility into the paths of applications. AppDynamics brings together application performance monitoring with monitoring of business performance and end users, which translates into key business analytics and actionable insight for customers. Cisco has augmented the usefulness of the platform with updates such as the introduction of the AppDynamics Experience Journey Map, a new view that provides users or partners with visibility into the path of an application using data science algorithms that can pull out information in real time. The map shows user flows overlaid with performance and business metrics, which enable the identification of problems such as application bottlenecks.
Finalist: Microsoft Power BI
With Power BI, Microsoft offers an array of business intelligence and analytics capabilities including a simplified way to connect to and visualize data, paired with the ability to gain insight from the data using analytics. Power BI also enables groups to easily collaborate together on the same data and share insight across Microsoft applications such as Teams and Excel.
Finalist: SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP has continued to build out the capabilities of its Business Technology Platform with a number of recent additions and enhancements to the portfolio of integrated products. Additions to the Business Technology Platform have included SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05, a new release of SAP HANA that supports hybrid environments and enhanced native storage extensions for simplifying data management.
Finalist: Splunk Cloud
Recent updates to Splunk Cloud—the company’s cloud-based machine data platform service—include the ability to run the service on the Google Cloud, joining Amazon Web Services. Key benefits include real-time visibility across Google Cloud events, logs, performance metrics and billing data, as well as performance monitoring for Google Cloud Services with Splunk’s SignalFX platform.
Finalist: Tableau
The recent debut of Tableau 2020.3 added capabilities for outputting to and updating external databases directly from the Tableau Prep Builder tool—which enables Tableau to meet a wider number of data preparation needs—as well as the introduction of new Tableau administrator tools that simplify the distribution of product licenses.