How is Visiology different from other Russian BI vendors?

But let’s go over the main conclusions that were made in the review and discuss what they mean for the Russian market in general and for us in particular.

Most of the system integrators are our partners

Probably, no one is surprised that the largest players in the BI market are system integrators (of course, they can also be vendors, but this does not change things). And in the list of the most active IT giants in the field of business intelligence, we see a lot of familiar names. Some of them became our partners before 2022, while others signed an agreement in 2022. In general, judging by the TAdviser table, at the beginning of the year Visiology has the most integrator partners who are involved in the implementation and integration of our platform both from scratch and to replace vendors leaving Russia.

Almost all of these names can be found on our partner pageand the full table of integrators (which also contains many familiar brands) can be viewed in TAdviser article.

TOP10 largest BI vendors in Russia identified

With the proviso that revenue was still calculated for 2021, when Qlik, Tableau and Power BI still unconditionally dominated the market, TAdviser analysts assessed the potential of Russian vendors. In this context, all revenues that companies declared as received from “BI projects” were taken into account.

On the one hand, Visiology is in the TOP10, and this seems to be not bad, given that, according to Krug Gromov, more than 20 BI platforms have already appeared in Russia. But on the other hand, in the materials of TAdviser a quite logical idea is given:

“BI Consult experts believe that in their reports, many integrators overestimate the cost of BI, including the implementation of additional software and the solution of common infrastructure tasks, incl. development and creation of modern data warehouses”.

Different BI companies have different business models

And here I just want to stop at a very interesting point. Different BI platforms imply completely different cycles of implementation and integration into the IT ecosystem. Some require large-scale support of the vendor itself, while others can be used as a boxed solution by integrators-partners or by the customers themselves.

Thus, the picture of the distribution of profits from the sale of licenses is completely different. Here, according to the results of 2021, Visiology is immediately in second place. This is because we try to give away a finished product that is ready to be built into existing IT infrastructures. So, Visiology can work with any ETL connector, supports both fast In-Memory calculations and work with external DBMS.

“The data provided by the study participants showed that the ratio of income received directly from the sale of licenses to income from implementation services, maintenance support can be very different. The minimum percentage in 2021 was shown by Visiology, for which the share of services was only 3.4% of license sales, and the maximum was “League of Digital Economy”, whose services brought in 27 times more than licenses. Such differences are explained by the specifics of various BI tools and their scope. So, more highly specialized solutions, as well as projects with a high level of customization, require large implementation and maintenance costs, which once again emphasizes the importance of highlighting the cost of BI licenses from the overall structure of developers’ income when conducting market analysis, ”notes TAdviser.

This creates conditions for working with a wide range of integrators, and also allows customers with their own IT expertise to implement, develop and maintain the Visiology platform on their own.

Communities of specialists on Russian BI platforms have already been formed

The publication also provides statistics and data on specialist communities. And if you don’t count Yandex Datalens (which has a slightly different positioning than Visiology), as well as Loginom (after all, they are rather ETL developers, with which, by the way, Visiology is often used in conjunction), it turns out that Visiology has the largest professional community today . And this means that many questions can be asked simply from colleagues, not only from technical support employees.

Another fact that was confirmed by the study and rating of TAdviser is a huge number of specialists working with Western systems in the labor market. According to the publication, today the Microsoft Power BI user community is the most numerous – and it is the only one in the category that continues to grow actively.

Demand for analysts with knowledge of Western platforms is declining

Similarly, the number of vacancies is also large, which still require employees with experience in working with tools that were popular in past years. Yes, their number showed a drawdown in the summer of 2022, but then there was some recovery. This means that not all companies are ready to abandon the BI platform, which is now available only under the “gray” scheme. Many are still looking for a replacement or waiting for a suitable solution to hit the market. In this context, it becomes clear that there is a lot of interest in DAX support, which will be expanded throughout 2023 in Visiology 3.

Conclusion

Summing up, we can say that TAdviser has revealed a completely different business model of Visiology, which is more like the practice of Qlik or Tableau. In addition, we have not been working in vain on the development of the community to solve technical issues. As for the staff, in addition to those who are already working with Visiology today, the third version of the platform will have a good backlog of specialists who have been trained to work with Power BI.

Of course, it will be interesting for us to look at this rating at the end of 2022, when active migrations to Russian platforms (and Visiology in particular) began. So we draw conclusions and continue to monitor TAdviser. By the way, in the next post we will talk about the opinion of analysts about the technical development of BI platforms in Russia.