Constellation ShortList™ Multicloud Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms
Executive Summary
About This Constellation ShortList™
Multicloud Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms enable enterprises to deliver governed analytics and business intelligence across two or more major public cloud environments. These platforms help organizations analyze data where it lives, reduce cloud and vendor lock-in, limit unnecessary data movement, and provide consistent business semantics, security, performance, and business semantics across distributed cloud data estates.
This ShortList focuses on platforms that natively support multicloud deployment or managed service availability while also providing enterprise-grade data connectivity, semantic modeling, dashboards, reports, natural-language query, embedded analytics, collaboration, and governance. As analytics environments become more distributed, buyers increasingly require trusted metrics, policy-aware access, contextual analysis, auditability, and consistent insight delivery across cloud boundaries.
What’s new is that multicloud BI is no longer evaluated primarily on deployment flexibility and connectivity. Leading platforms are now separated by their ability to ground AI-assisted analysis in governed semantics, support multimodal insight delivery, optimize performance and cost across cloud environments, and help users move faster from trusted insight to business action.
Example use cases include enabling business users to ask natural- language questions across governed multicloud data sources, embedding churn-risk insights into CRM workflows, triggering supply-chain alerts from real-time IoT data across AWS and Azure, and delivering executive reporting across distributed cloud and SaaS application environments.
New additions to this ShortList include Qlik, reflecting its ability to combine cloud-agnostic analytics, data integration, governance, and enterprise-scale analytics across distributed environments.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for cloud-based business intelligence:
- Natively supports multicloud deployment or managed service availability across at least two major public cloud environments, with enterprise-grade availability, scalability, security, and administrative controls.
- Delivers secure, governed analytics across distributed data environments, including cloud data platforms, SaaS applications, hybrid systems, enterprise applications, and operational data sources, while preserving access controls, lineage, and trusted business definitions.
- Provides a consistent semantic and metadata-aware data modeling layer, including glossaries, shared metrics, KPIs, entities, dimensions, calculations, hierarchies, policies, lineage, and catalog integration to support trusted analytics across distributed sources.
- Supports data asset curation, certification, and collaborative governance, enabling teams to annotate, document, validate, certify, and manage trusted analytics assets through domain-based workflows.
- Supports core BI and multimodal analytics experiences, including dashboards, reports, visual exploration, natural- language query, conversational analytics, embedded analytics, APIs, and mobile or workflow-based consumption.
- Enables AI-assisted analysis grounded in governed enterprise data, including automated insights, GenAI prompts, explanations, predictive signals, and semantic grounding to improve trust and answer consistency.
- Supports collaboration and operationalization of insights, including alerts, annotations, sharing, embedded analytics, application integration, and workflow handoff so users can act on insights inside business processes.
- Provides scalability, performance optimization, and cost governance across cloud analytics workloads, including query performance, workload management, usage controls, and support for large-scale enterprise deployment.
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates more than 25 solutions categorized in this market. The Constellation ShortListis determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.
- DOMO
GOOGLE LOOKER
IBM WATSONX BI
MICROSTRATEGY
QLIK
SAP ANALYTICS CLOUD
SAS VISUAL ANALYTICS
THOUGHTSPOT
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and the research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.