Blog Assignment #1

Business Intelligence & Analysis Products

Businesses today have access to more data than ever. But collecting and analyzing that data and turning it into useful information is a big challenge. Today, many Business Intelligence tools are capable of handling large amounts of unstructured data to help identify, develop and create new strategic business opportunities.

Following are five Business Intelligence & Analysis products.

Features:            

1.      Web & Mobile Authoring:  Web & mobile authoring offers some of Tableau's most valuable analytical features. This means that you're able to edit the view in any browser, including on a mobile device. It includes the ability to show and hide quick filters, so you can slice your data. These analytical functions can help you get to answers in your data while you're on the go.

2.      Dashboards: Tableau hosts variety of new features including the ability to overlap objects on a dashboard. This provides far more flexibility in how authors can present information and should allow for compelling designs. It even allows floating objects. You can add hyperlinks to captions, titles, and dashboard text objects simply by typing the link. Reaching out to external information can be an excellent way to extend an analysis.

3.      Forecasting: Tableau provides built-in statistical models to forecast your data including models that account for seasonality and trends.

4.      Data: Tableau supports a native connector to Salesforce®, force.com®, and database.com®. It also offers a direct connector to Google BigQuery, Google’s technology for fast, interactive analysis of massive data. This integration allows anyone to quickly analyze massive amounts of data using simple drag-and-drop operations, i.e. no coding necessary.

5.      Business Integration: Developers creating web applications can integrate fully interactive Tableau content into their applications via the new JavaScript API. The API provides a tremendous range of interactivity in the Tableau view. This enables you to provide a high level of interactivity between a Tableau visualization and the rest of the web page.

                                      

Features:

1.      Self-service and Visualization: Empower users with a complete self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Power BI for Office 365.  Its Mobile BI access to reports in Power BI for Office 365 is provided through new HTML5 support and a native mobile application for Windows 8 tablets.

2.      Dashboards & Reporting: SharePoint Server provides a full set of rich dashboard and scorecard capabilities including advanced filtering, guided navigation, interactive analytics, and visualizations. It even helps you Scale your environment from a few reports to a corporate-wide deployment. SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive, highly scalable solution providing operational reporting for browser-based viewing, as well as ad-hoc data exploration and visualization.

3.      Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services empowers you to build comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytic solutions that leverage in-memory technology and provide interactive exploration of aggregated data. The Services platform builds high performance analytical models (multidimensional and tabular) that can be used for interactive data analysis, reporting, and visualization.

4.      Predictive analytics: SQL Server predictive analytics perform insightful analysis by including data-mining results as dimensions in your Analysis Services cubes. It adds prediction functions to calculations and key performance indicators. It natively integrates reporting by using data-mining queries as the source in Reporting Services.

Features:                                                    

1.      OLAP Analytics: The industry-leading multi-dimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) server is designed to help business users forecast likely business performance levels and deliver "what-if" analyses for varying conditions. It supports analysis and reporting for a thousands of users with access to very large data sets and rapidly discover and highlight trends in these very large data sets

2.      Scorecard and Strategy Management: Define strategic goals and objectives that can be cascaded to every level of the enterprise, enabling employees to understand their impact on achieving success and align their actions accordingly.

3.      Mobile BI: The Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Mobile portfolio brings data driven, analytic insights to smartphones and tablets without compromising data integrity or security.

4.      Enterprise Reporting: Provides a single, Web-based platform for authoring, managing, and delivering interactive reports, dashboards, and all types of highly formatted documents.

Features:                                                

1.      Analytics: MicroStrategy supports a full range of analytic functionality, from stunning business dashboards to sophisticated statistical analysis and data mining. Its platform gives you the flexibility to start small and seamlessly scale to an enterprise deployment.

2.      Dashboards: MicroStrategy is the only platform that combines the analytics and interactivity of Dashboards with the immediacy of real-time operational dashboards, ensuring that decision-makers can spot, analyze, and react to quickly changing trends and outliers.

3.      Reporting: MicroStrategy includes the world’s best enterprise reporting, so users can securely deliver pixel-perfect, boardroom quality reports and statements to any number of internal users, partners, or customers. It offers automated document distribution, along with subscription to reports so that you always have the most up to date information.

4.      Mobility: MicroStrategy effortlessly supports the distribution and consumption of analytics across all major media. Any report or dashboard can instantly be viewed anywhere, with no loss of formatting or functionality.

Features:                                                                         

1.      Analysis: IBM Cognos offers flexible solutions with guided report analysis, dashboards, navigable reports and mobile business intelligence. It explores data and track business developments with capabilities for tracking patterns and adding them to your charts and graphs. It also uncovers patterns in your business and apply algorithms to business intelligence data to predict outcomes.

2.      Reports: IBM Cognos includes capabilities for authoring, viewing and modifying reports and interactive visualizations—online or off, in Microsoft Office applications or in-process applications, in the office or on the go.

3.      Dashboards: IBM includes dashboards that you can view, interact with and personalize in ways that support the unique way you analyze data and make decisions. Historical information alongside current data, data in motion and predictive analytics help you quickly move from insight to decision—all in one dashboard.

4.      Mobile Apps: With IBM business intelligence mobile apps for Apple iPhone and iPad and Android tablets and smartphones, you can interact with reports, analysis, dashboards and more on your mobile device of choice.

5.      Real-time monitoring: IBM Cognos includes a real-time monitoring capability that makes it possible for you to view your operations data in motion. It features self-service, interactive dashboards with current operational KPIs and measures for frontline business users, including executives on the go, managers and analysts, who need to react quickly to performance improvement opportunities.

To summarize, following is criteria analysis for the products discussed above:

Criteria	Weight	Tableau	Microsoft BI	Oracle BI	Microstrategy	IBM Cognos
Reporting Features	30%	5	8	6	7	6
Analysis Features	30%	6	8	8	7	7
Dashboard & Mobility	20%	9	5	7	6	5
Integration	10%	9	5	6	8	5
Cost	10%	3	8	6	4	7
Total Points	100%	6.3	7.1	6.8	6.6	6.1
Rank		4	1	2	3	5

What these criteria mean:

·         Reporting & Analysis Features: This indicates the strength of analytic and reporting capability the tool provides.

·         Dashboard & Mobility: This indicates the flexibility and ease of use of dashboard the tool provides. Mobility indicates how easily the tool interacts with mobile devices.

·         Integration: It indicates the variety of databases the tool can connect with. The higher this number, the more versatile the tool is.

·         Cost: This reflects the cost per user of a licensed version of the tool.

What these ratings mean for the products:

Microsoft BI: It is better for large enterprise-wide deployments with pre-existing investments in SQL Server and Office. Organizations using a different RDBMS will have a steeper learning curve. Therefore it scored low in the Integration criteria. Its dashboard capabilities are limited and it is also not as flexible with mobile devices as the other tools. Hence it scored low in the dashboard & mobility criteria. But it is inexpensive and has strong reporting and analytical capabilities.

Oracle BI: Its reporting platform has great tools for building reports and dashboards. Its analysis features have a strong market presence. However, it ranks moderately with dashboard, mobility and integration capabilities.

MicroStrategy: It is very well suited for small and large companies and for varying degrees of budgets. Its reporting, analysis, dashboard and mobility capabilities are somewhat moderate as compared to the other tools.

Tableau: It is useful for those who want to build real time visualizations on the run, with little technical expertise. Since it provides variety of dashboard functionalities and supports various databases, it scored high in those criteria. But it lacks strong reporting and analysis features and is expensive too.

IBM Cognos: It is great at consistently delivering static historical reports to users across the enterprise. It connects well to the majority of enterprise data storage systems. However, it is a difficult tool to use that requires a specialized set of skills in order to be productive, hence the lowest rank.