Gartner waves white flag on Excel in BI

Around 500 Million people around the world work with spreadsheets, most of them with Excel. Plenty of them use Excel workbooks for planning, analyzing and reporting. However, most BI vendors have tried for decades to convince users to give up Excel in favor of what they thought to be more functional and manageable BI tools. Gradually, some BI vendors changed politics and offered integration with Excel, accepting Excel as a frontend. At the recent Gartner BI Summit in Las Vegas, the adversaries of Excel admitted failure: Gartner analysts and BI managers said that efforts to stop Excel BI use in its tracks were bound to fail and urged vendors and IT managers to make their peace with Excel as a BI tool. Managers who presented case stories stated “…the vast majority of end users – perhaps 90% – take data from the BI tools and export the information to Excel so they can work on it there”. Everybody is familiar with Excel, it is very flexible and easy to handle. Furthermore, Excel allows users to model ad-hoc queries or plan scenarios without technical skills but with fast results.

It is also stated that “the number of Excel BI users easily outstrips the combined total of people who are using the regular BI applications”.

That’s why Palo is not only designed for the so-called BI market but also for the multiple of people doing BI with Excel. Most of them are not even aware that doing reports and analyses with Excel could be called BI. So the BI market is much larger than it is usually thought to be. The circle with the doted line in the graph below shows the combined market of Palo both in the genuine BI market and in the spreadsheet market.

Of course, nobody would propose Excel as a stand-alone BI-solution. But Microsoft Excel-Add-ins like Palo offer central data storage and avoid the well known spreadsheet hell. Palo Suite allows Excel workbooks to be converted into web-based database applications. This helps combine the efficient development permitted by Excel applications with the advantages of web applications, which can otherwise take a lot of time and effort to implement.