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"Business Intelligence is providing the right data at the right time to right people so that they can take the right decisions." The term Business Intelligence (BI) revolves around the technology-driven process for analysing data and delivering actionable information to take brilliant business decisions. Business intelligence tool encapsulates strategies and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis of business information.
BI tools are types of application software which collect and process large amounts of unstructured data from internal and external systems, including books, journals, documents, health records, images, files, email, video and other business sources. Albeit not as flexible as business analytics tools, BI tools provide a way of deciphering data to find information through queries. These tools also help prepare data for analysis to create reports, dashboards and data visualisations. The results empower organizations to accelerate and improve decision-making, increase operational efficiency, identify market trends, and identify new business opportunities.
The following are the top self-service analytical and BI platforms that help to converge to data-driven decision-making and improve their business acumen:
Tableau offers interactive data visualization products based on business intelligence. The software offers color, animation and cartography expertise to make data visualizations as easy as possible. Tableau connects a wide range of data sources, from established sources like Excel to recent additions like Amazon Aurora, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and MapR Hadoop Hive Connectivity for Mac. Tableau is quick to implement and its visualization extends into the administrator tools, such as visual permissioning and governance. There are five ways to access their products: Desktop (both professional and personal editions), Server, Online (which scales to support thousands of users), Reader, and Public, with the last two free to use, and Vizable, a consumer data visualization mobile app by Tableau.
Qlik is inspired from PC-based desktop "Quick View" and was initially termed as Quality Understanding Interaction, Knowledge. Qlik is an established name in the data visualization, BI and analytics space and offers an array of products. Qlik breaks its products according to how much support users require. Customers can choose from a self-service solution called Qlik Sense, the original guided analytics QlikView, a guided and analytics option called Qlik Analytics Platform or external data feeds through Qlik DataMarket.
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics for multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics. SAS is a software that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. SAS provides a graphical point and good user interface for non-technical users and more advanced options through the SAS language. Being in the era of automation, SAS has an analytical platform called Viya which can be updated and integrated with artificial intelligence. Viya is a huge platform of capabilities for all expertise levels, from Visual Analytics for reports and dashboards to event stream processing and complex model management.
Looker is a data exploration app that provides an intuitive approach to data. It gives a web-based interface that business users can utilize to tap into the expertise of their data analytics team. It can build and share reports and other functional groups can benefit from the questions they're asking and the knowledge they've created. Thus, Looker can help all companies use data to drive their business decisions and activities in the right direction. With the help of SQL knowledge, it will be easy to use Looker work for building our own analytic modules.
Power BI is a set of business analytical tools to deliver insights to the organization. It provides interactive visualizations and self-service BI capabilities where end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves. Power BI delivers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and an interactive dashboard. Power BI also has an additional service embedded on its Azure cloud platform. Also, it can load custom visualizations in accord with the business requirements.
Domo is a computer software organization which focuses on business intelligence and data visualization. It works by allowing any data source to be plugged into the platform out-of-the-box and enables users to prepare data for analysis without knowing how to code in SQL. It also helps to automate regular reports for the organization to collaborate on.
Teradata is an enterprise that develops and sells data analytics software. It integrates a diverse set of analytical systems and data format into a single environment. It includes SQL with embedded analytics functions, a machine learning engine that provides pre-built analytic functions and a graph engine that discovers relationships between people, products and processes. "4D Analytics" is a process that combines geospatial data with time series data to support the constantly evolving time and location variables.
IBM Watson Analytics offers advanced data analysis and visualizations solutions in the cloud that guides through the analysis of the data. The prevalence of machine learning helps IBM for smart data discovery, natural language queries, automated predictive analytics and cognitive capabilities out of the box for your own data. IBM Watson Analytics for social media which tracks customer sentiment across millions of data and social media sources helps to deliver meaningful insights.
Salesforce Einstein is an artificial intelligence technology that had been developed for the Salesforce customer success platform. Einstein encapsulates all the machine learning capabilities in Salesforce product portfolio with automation and smarter insights. The product involves predictive analysis for forecasting data to help users find and explain insights from data and using automated analytics to find the most crucial insights.
SAP Analytics Cloud is an all-in-one cloud platform for business intelligence, planning and predictive analysis. It provides end-to-end BI platforms with dashboards along with machine learning built into key insights and integrated planning features. The product provides real-time analytics and collaboration tools in the cloud. It can be used on-premise or cloud data sources for past or live data from SAP or any other external sources.
