The Dashboard Spy

12 Enterprise BI Platforms have been evaluated as part of the latest Forrester Wave study: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms Q3 2008. (Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spies who posted the findings document.)

Based on their evaluation of 151 criteria, Forrester finds that IBM/Cognos and SAP/Business Objects maintain market leading positions while Oracle and SAS Institute move up into leadership spots in enterprise BI because of their product functionality, scalability and completeness of corporate/product vision and strategy.

Here’s a diagram with the results of the BI platform evaluation:

A look at the relative scoring of the BI platforms compared across various criteria:

Click on the read more to find out more about the study of these BI platforms:

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Dashboard Topic: Visualizing the Data behind the 2008 Olympic Medal Count.

Data visualizations from the New York Times are usually visually stunning and well thought out. This fine example is no exception. The animated nature of these flash-based dashboards and data visualization graphics allow for intuitive analysis, especially for understanding trends over long periods of time.

Visit the Olympics Medal Count Map or watch the Dashboard Spy video below.

The results of the 2008 summer games being held in Beijing, China are displayed along with their historical context. Sliders allow back and forth visualization of the trends. Note in particular the swell and sudden disappearance of the Soviet medals in the 80’s. An interesting time in political history noticeable from the data in an interesting manner.

What do you think of this data visualization?

Tags: 2008 Olympic Medal Count, Olympics Medal Map, Data Visualization, New York Times