Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Many organizations have adopted DataOps to apply agile development, DevOps and lean manufacturing processes to the development, testing, deployment and orchestration of data integration and processing pipelines. The most likely ultimate outcome of these pipelines is the analytics reports and dashboards enterprises rely on to make business decisions.

However, as my colleague David Menninger previously explained, far fewer enterprises have recognized the importance of AnalyticOps, which represents the last mile of DataOps by ensuring that the delivery of analytics reports and dashboards to business users and decision-makers is subject to continuous development and testing. AnalyticOps also makes certain that analytics reports and dashboards are flexible and adaptable to change. The gap in the market related to AnalyticOps software is creating opportunities for vendors that can address these needs, including specialist providers such as Wiiisdom.

Wiiisdom was founded in 2007 by business intelligence software experts led by chief executive Sebastien Goiffon to improve the management of business intelligence tools and applications and reduce the risks of making decisions based on low-quality data. The opportunity for vendors that enable analytics governance is highlighted by Ventana Research’s Data Governance Benchmark Research. While 95% of participants consider it important to govern analytics and business intelligence technologies, only 52% have data governance policies that address analytics charts, tables, reports and dashboards.

Initially known as GB&SMITH and focused on SAP BusinessObjects implementations, the company expanded its purview to multiple BI environments with the acquisition of Kinesis CI in October 2020 and rebranded as Wiiisdom the following year. Wiiisdom Ops (formerly Kinesis CI) provides analytics testing and governance for Salesforce’s Tableau, Microsoft’s Power BI and SAP’s BusinessObjects. The company also offers the Wiiisdom 360 Suite of governance capabilities for SAP BusinessObjects, including auditing, backup and recovery, regression testing, security and monitoring. In 2022, Wiiisdom announced that it had raised €6 million ($5.9 million) from Isatis Capital in its first funding round and planned to triple its turnover and workforce by 2025.

As I previously explained, despite the recent focus on data-driven decision-making, only one-third of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research are satisfied with their organization’s use of analytics and data. Common complaints related to analytics and business intelligence include challenges integrating with business processes, a lack of adaptability to change and complexity accessing data sources. These factors can combine to produce data quality concerns, doubts about data validity and frustration with a lack of responsiveness that ultimately leads to a lack of trust in analytics and data.

Wiiisdom’s analytics governance software is designed to help ensure data is accurate, up-to-date and consistent across different systems and teams and that analytical models are robust, reliable and continuously improved. I recently explained how I see AnalyticOps as an important component of data intelligence, supporting automated, collaborative and agile approaches to the consumption of data, complementing DataOps’ focus on data production to provide a holistic view of data production and consumption across an enterprise. I assert that by 2026, one-half of enterprises will adopt an AnalyticOps approach similar to and integrated with DataOps processes to enhance responsiveness and agility.

Wiiisdom addresses the last mile of the data life cycle by providing testing, validation and reconciliation via Wiiisdom Ops for Tableau, Wiiisdom Ops for Power BI, and Wiiisdom Ops for SAP BusinessObjects. The products are designed to integrate into continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines and enables analytics teams to test reports and dashboards to verify that they comply with business and regulatory requirements related to accuracy and performance before being certified and promoted into production. Testing capabilities provided by Wiiisdom Ops address the integrity of data pipelines, the functional user experience, dashboard performance under normal and extreme conditions and role-based data access policies. Wiiisdom Ops also provides regression testing to evaluate the impact of changes prior to promotion into production.

Certification of reports and dashboards is important to encourage trust in the data used to make business decisions and is increasingly a focus for enterprises to demonstrate compliance with auditing requirements. Wiiisdom recently introduced Tableau dashboard extension and certification capabilities to provide users with visual confirmation that their dashboards have been tested and certified for accuracy, adding to functionality already available for SAP BusinessObjects.

Ventana Research’s 2023 Analytics and Data Buyers Guide report assesses 22 providers’ products using our Ventana Research methodology and highlights opportunities for Wiiisdom to expand the breadth of analytics products it addresses. Additionally, Wiiisdom’s 360Suite could extend the depth of capabilities provided for Tableau and Power BI to match those offered for SAP BusinessObjects.

I recommend that enterprises using SAP BusinessObjects, Salesforce Tableau or Microsoft Power BI evaluate Wiiisdom and its potential to improve trust in data to increase efficiency, revenue and competitiveness by automating analytics, BI and governance processes. With its focus on analytics governance, the company addresses an important aspect of data integrity that is not well-served by data governance, DataOps or analytics software providers.

Regards,

Matt Aslett