A Pepsi Challenge for Analytics & BI? Our take on the 2024 Gartner® Analytics & Business Intelligence Bake-Off

For decades the Pepsi Challenge marketing promotion asked people to compare Pepsi and Coke. On the surface the aim was to ‘prove’ that people preferred the taste of Pepsi, but I don’t believe that’s why Pepsi ran the campaign. The real objective, in my view, was just to get people to try Pepsi.

I’ve long thought that we need something like the Pepsi Challenge for analytics and BI software to get people to consider options other than the obvious. Although by no means a blind test (impossible in such a visual field), I think the Gartner Analytics & Business Intelligence Bake-Off could offer the jolt people need to do that. For more information on the Analytics & BI Bake-Off, Gartner subscribers can see here.

“The ABI Bake-Off is an on-stage event, where three vendors demonstrate the same capabilities of their products live. The vendors all have the same dataset and script to follow, allowing the audience to see a side-by-side comparison between the platforms and their capabilities. This is a unique approach, since Gartner drives the narrative of the demonstrations, as opposed to vendor-guided demos.”¹ This year the products in the Bake-Off arena in Orlando were Microsoft Power BI, Salesforce Tableau Cloud and (for the first time) Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), and we believe all of them showed well on stage.

That said, we believe that the results of the 2024 Bake-Off showed why organizations that want a strong ABI product should give Oracle Analytics Cloud a try. Although no one publishes how the audience voted before and after seeing the demos, we can say this, the final results in Orlando completely upended peoples’ expectations. 

We find that even experienced analytics professionals are sometimes surprised by how strong and competitive Oracle Analytics Cloud has become. Here’s a quote from the SuperDataBrothers’ YouTube posting after seeing OAC at the 2023 Gartner Data and Analytics summit:

“Oracle?! This was surprising to me! Top Tool, Oracle!? ORACLE?!?!... So really when I say I was impressed with Oracle what I mean is that they really had a nice UX that I thought combined classic data viz use cases with kind of DS/AI use cases in a single package that was easy to navigate and I think end users will like, and you can’t say that about a lot of what you might call legacy vendors, and so I put them as a Top Tool because I was pleasantly surprised by it.”

Sounds like a Pepsi Challenge moment to me!

In our opinion, responses like this reflect that Oracle Analytics is now one of the most compelling analytics & BI platforms available. For the last few years, the ABI market has been prone to brand tribalism, fanboy/girl behaviour and ‘if it comes with Office’ sourcing, but when it comes down to it, what people really need is an ABI tool that helps them do their job and make better decisions with data, and that fits into their ecosystem.

If you’re an Oracle customer and you don’t use Oracle Analytics you should definitely give it a try. 

For those of you who want to see exactly what we showed on stage:

• "The theme for 2024 was poverty rates across the globe." Data management - like all of the vendors Oracle’s exploration followed the same flow, with data preparation first, here our out-of-the-box profiling and enrichment was invaluable…

Section 1: Data Management

• Analysis - next we did an analysis from scratch, showing how OAC’s auto insights functions uncover findings instantly, and how the new Gen AI Assistant is integrated into a seamless experience…

Section 2: Analysis, Content Creation, and Collaboration

• Sharing - following on we showed how our data storytelling capabilities help people share what they find in varied formats – including podcasts - across different devices...

Section 3: Share Findings

• Innovation - finally, we showed some of the innovative ways we’re considering that will change how analytics is delivered in future…

Section 4: Differentiators and Cool Innovations

• It was an honor to be selected to take part in the 2024 Gartner Analytics & BI Bake-Off. As the demos showed Oracle Analytics is a compelling alternative to the commonplace options – why not give it a try?

Click here for more information on Oracle Analytics.

¹ Gartner, Comparing Analytics and BI Platforms: Live Demos From Gartner’s Bake-Off, 24 June 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.