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According to Gartner, “The demand side of the BI platform market in 2010 was defined by an intensified struggle between business users' need for ease of use and flexibility on the one hand, and IT's need for standards and control on the other. With ‘ease of use’ now surpassing ‘functionality’ for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion in research conducted for this report, vocal, demanding and influential business users are increasingly driving BI purchasing decisions, most often choosing easier to use data discovery tools over traditional BI platforms — with or without IT's consent.”

The report goes on to say “Data discovery platform momentum accentuates the need for a portfolio approach. For the past two years, our research in the BI platform market has highlighted a growing bifurcation in terms of buying centers. Specifically, we noted that IT, on the one hand, favors stack centricity, whereas business users and departmental buyers, on the other, often with an enterprise BI standard in place, are increasingly turning to innovative, data discovery tool vendors. These data discovery alternatives to traditional BI platforms offer highly interactive and graphical user interfaces built on in-memory architectures to address business users' unmet ease-of-use and rapid deployment needs. What began as a market buying trend in 2010 has become a fully fledged fragmentation of the market into two distinct segments.”