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BARC — The BI & Analytics Survey

As of 2026-07-24T14:00:00Z

Edited by Cédric-Olivier Mâry, sole editor and publication director — 27 years in the SAP ecosystem. How these pages are produced, and where automation is used.

What is BARC — The BI & Analytics Survey?

BARC's Survey scores come from named users of each specific tool, not analyst demos — making it the credible evidence for a 'why SAC over Power BI' objection.

The BARC BI & Analytics Survey is the largest recurring user-experience study of business intelligence and analytics software in the world, gathering ratings from several thousand active practitioners on the tools they actually use in production — not from analysts evaluating a vendor demonstration, but from named users rating business benefit, project success, customer satisfaction and specific product capabilities by use case.

What separates it from the vendor-briefing research most consultants are used to: every score in the Survey traces back to a real, identified user of that specific product. A Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave is built primarily from analyst evaluation criteria and vendor briefings, weighted by the analyst's judgment of strategic fit; the BARC Survey is built from a large panel of practitioners scoring their lived deployment experience. This is why enterprise procurement teams frequently cite it directly in RFP scorecards — it answers "do real users like using this and did the project succeed," a different and often more decision-relevant question than "does this vendor have the right roadmap."

How the Survey is structured

Why it matters

Peer-group scoring (enterprise BI, self-service BI, embedded, cloud, agile) stops SAC being penalised for complexity by SMB-focused reviewers, and vice versa.
SAC scores highly on SAP ERP integration and financial planning but faces stiffer competition in pure self-service peer groups against Power BI and Tableau.
Procurement teams cite the Survey directly in RFP scorecards, so its peer-group placement carries more weight than an analyst quadrant.

Key points

World's largest annual BI user-experience survey — several thousand active practitioners, not analyst-opinion scores.
KPIs measured: business benefit, project success, customer satisfaction, and recommendation (NPS-style) per vendor.
Peer-group scoring: enterprise BI, self-service BI, embedded analytics, cloud BI, agile BI — prevents size/complexity mismatch bias.
SAC strength zones: SAP ERP integration, financial planning, governed enterprise BI — consistently peer-group leaders in SAP-anchored estates.
SAC competitive gaps: pure self-service BI peer groups where Power BI and Tableau have larger user bases and broader adoption evidence.
Use it in competitive selection to answer 'why SAC over Power BI/Tableau?' with user-evidence, not vendor marketing.
Do not conflate with Trend Monitor (C278): Survey = user satisfaction per tool; Trend Monitor = practitioner priority rankings across the market.
Full peer-group KPI scores and vendor rankings are paywalled (BARC+); public summaries name leaders but not full rank.
Project success KPI is particularly valuable: it measures whether implementations met scope, budget, and timeline — a direct proxy for delivery risk.
Cite Survey data with the peer-group qualifier: 'SAC leads in the enterprise BI peer group for SAP-anchored organisations' is a defensible claim; 'SAC is best BI tool' is not.

Terms used on this page

Peer group: BARC's mechanism for comparable scoring — vendors are grouped by use-case profile (e.g. 'enterprise BI for large organisations with >1,000 employees') before ranking, preventing size and complexity mismatch bias.
Business benefit KPI: BARC Survey metric measuring whether the tool delivered the business value the organisation expected — the single most impactful KPI for buyer confidence in a competitive selection.
Project success KPI: BARC Survey metric measuring whether implementations met scope, budget, and timeline targets — a proxy for delivery risk and implementation quality, not just software quality.
Recommendation score: Net-promoter-style metric from the BARC Survey: the likelihood of the current user recommending the tool to a peer — analogous to NPS but scoped to the BI/analytics tool category.
Enterprise BI peer group: BARC's peer group for large-organisation, governed BI deployments — SAC's strongest competitive positioning peer group due to SAP ERP integration depth.
Self-service BI peer group: BARC's peer group for self-service data exploration tools; dominated by Power BI and Tableau by user volume — SAC's most challenging competitive context.
BARC+: BARC's subscription research tier giving access to full ranked KPI tables, peer-group breakdowns, and vendor comparison data beyond the public summary teasers.
Decision owner: The accountable person who accepts the trade-off and funds the next action.

Sources

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