ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

LogiXML has been around for more than a decade, but has seen particularly robust growth in the past year. Recent announcements show the company with better than 100-percent year-over-year growth, driven by a 97 percent license renewal rate and new customer growth in SMB, departmental and OEM deployments. The 158-percent growth for the embedded analytics group for the fourth quarter on a year-over-year basis was particularly strong. LogiXML categorizes its products into Logi Info, its flagship product targeted primarily at IT and developers; Logi Ad Hoc, targeted as a self-service tool for business users; and a suite of the two bundled with ETL capabilities. Just a few weeks ago, LogiXML released Logi Info v11. The product offers enhanced visualization capabilities, making analytics easier and more robust for end users. Building on an already solid product, the changes in Logi Info seem to be more evolutionary than revolutionary, and appear to be focused on keeping up with functionality necessary to compete in today’s BI market. With that said, the core product has advantages as simple, highly embeddable software. Its light footprint and ease of use are competitive advantages, allowing companies to quickly and easily put business intelligence capabilities into the hands of end users, as well as into the applications themselves. Usability is by far the number one criterion for companies choosing a business intelligence application, according to our benchmark research on next-generation business intelligence. LogiXML’s ease of use for developers enables companies to tell a compelling time-to-value story for embedding intelligence directly into applications, and takes advantage of the market trend toward agile development. As I’ve written on numerous occasions and most recently in Big Data Faces a Chasm of Misunderstanding, the key challenge for organizations is overcoming the lack of an analytics-driven culture. This challenge is different for IT and for business users, as IT focuses on things such as standards, security and information management, while business users focus more on providing specific insights for business decisions. My colleague Mark Smith has also written about this environment and specifically about how BI tools are failing business. LogiXML’s ability to put BI directly into applications in an agile way allows the company to overcome many of these arguments, since applications fit directly into the role-based decision environments that drive companies today. Interestingly, the company is said to be rebranding in 2013. Rebranding is always a large effort and often pays off well for a consumer brand or a broad business brand, but given LogiXML’s size and core advantage in the OEM market, the return on such a move is questionable. Rebranding is often associated with a need to reposition a company in the mind of its customers and prospects. Perhaps LogiXML is looking to drive its brand into the business user side of the equation with an Intel Inside-type of strategy, or target business users themselves. Either way, the end-game here is unclear given a limited data discovery portfolio and no clear value path to sell directly to business end users. For LogiXML, this path is still primarily through IT and secondarily through business. Furthermore, many new business intelligence and analytic brands coming on the market also target the business end user, so the company will need to make a significant investment in basic awareness-building in order to gain parity with the current brand equity. Branding aside, the challenge for the company’s continued trajectory of growth is twofold. First, it is reaching an inflection point in its number of employees. As a company reaches about 200 employees, which LogiXML is approaching now, company culture often transforms itself. With solid leadership and a strong roadmap, LogiXML will be able to overcome this first challenge. The second challenge is that it competes in a highly competitive segment against all the major stack players as well as with the more cost-oriented open source players. The expanding market landscape of business intelligence to business analytics, including data discovery and predictive analytics, introduces a host of new players and dilutes the broader opportunity as customers settle into their approaches. In sum, LogiXML is often able to provide the path of least resistance and solid time-to-value for companies looking to quickly and effectively roll out business intelligence capabilities. In particular, as SaaS providers and OEM relationships continue to gain steam, the embeddable nature of LogiXML’s platform and the ability to construct applications at an elemental level gives the company a good market position from which to advance. Like many others in the increasingly crowded BI space, it will need to capitalize on its current market momentum and solidify its position before others start to invade more of its addressable space. For those organizations looking for an integrated business intelligence platform and tools should assess the improvements in this latest release of LogiXML. Regards, Tony Cosentino VP and Research Director

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