Defining good performance

With the advent of ever-faster computers and the massive scale of processing available today by way of cloud computing, business users expect and demand analytical solutions that perform well. This is essential for competitive business decision-making. Business Intelligence (BI) software vendors echo this need and tend to promise quick results in their sales and marketing materials. Their expectations mean that it is uncommon to find users getting excited about how fast reports are or how fresh data is because it is something implicit to them having a positive experience.

Conversely, when users must wait a long time for a report to load, they are quite vocal and tend to escalate such issues via multiple channels. When these problems are widespread, they can damage the reputation of both software platforms and the teams involved in building and maintaining those solutions. In the worst possible case, users may refuse to adopt these solutions and management...