Analytics and business intelligence platforms empower organizations to gain the most advanced and up to date intelligence from the data they gather across their network. This allows them to best use the data at their disposal to drive decision making and improve outcomes. These solutions allow users to leverage the improved understanding they gain from these data-driven insights and use them to take more decisive action, boost operational efficiency, improve customers experiences, and support better business growth.
Analytics and BI platforms are designed to ingest data from various sources, process it, and present it in a user-friendly manner. The overarching goal is to facilitate informed decision-making. These platforms often include features like data warehousing, drag-and-drop dashboard creation, advanced analytical processing, and machine learning capabilities for predictive and prescriptive analytics.
It is important for businesses to ensure they fully understand the ins and outs of their daily operations and to have a clear view of their important information and data to stay competitive. This is where an effective analytics and business intelligence platform comes into its own.
In this article, we will explore the top analytics and business intelligence platforms. We’ll delve into features such as data visualization, data analysis, dashboards, and reporting, as well as provide background information on each vendor and offer our recommendations for who each solution would be best suited to.
Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) service that provides a unified platform to facilitate data analysis and the sharing of insights across organizations. It is used by over 100,000 organizations globally. This solution allows users to derive meaningful insights from their data through various features such as interactive dashboards, paginated reports, and embedded analytics. Leveraging machine learning technologies, QuickSight simplifies data interpretation. It provides natural language queries, making it’s a user-friendly option for individuals without extensive BI experience.
QuickSight stands out for its effective capabilities and features. These enable BI teams to integrate interactive visualizations and dashboards directly into their existing applications, enhancing user experiences and creating new monetization avenues. Users can ask specific questions regarding their data and receive relevant, quickly processed visualizations and answers, streamlining the process of turning data into actionable insights. QuickSight is highly scalable and matches the unique needs of different business setups without the need for extensive server management or setup. This efficiency is paired with a cost-effective pricing structure, where users are only billed for the features they use, avoiding the need for bulk licensing purchases.
Domo provides a business intelligence platform that facilitates real-time data analysis and visualization. The platform streamlines the decision-making process enabling individuals to turn raw data into actionable insights. With its user-friendly interface, Domo allows users to interact with data dynamically and derive essential business answers without complex processes.
The key features of Domo center around its data visualization and reporting capabilities. Users can create interactive dashboards that present data in an easy-to-understand format and encourage deeper exploration to unearth patterns and trends. The solution enables easy sharing of real-time data dashboards with team members, ensuring that everyone has access to relevant data.
Domo also integrates AI and machine learning technologies to augment its business intelligence workflows, allowing users to glean predictive insights that can effectively steer business strategies. Domo provides embedded analytics, enabling users to share real-time analytics with customers and partners, as well as enhancing reporting and collaborative efforts.
IBM Cognos Analytics is a comprehensive business intelligence tool that assists organizations in harnessing the power of data through AI-driven insights and visualization. The platform provides comprehensive data analytics, facilitating a holistic view of business trends and predictions. Cognos Analytics integrates seamlessly with various data sources, allowing for a streamlined process of data modeling and exploration, where users can easily upload, connect, and manipulate their data to extract meaningful information.
The key features of this solution include interactive dashboards and enterprise reports that provide a visually engaging representation of data analysis outcomes, that can be shared across various platforms including email and Slack. Dashboards include predictive forecasting and decision trees. Cognos Analytics also provides an AI assistant that enhances data exploration and prediction strategies. The Cognos Assistant AI can interpret queries in natural language to generate insightful charts and dashboards, making data analytics more accessible. The solution also facilities data preparation, helping save time and improving the efficiency of data management processes. The product also offers a mobile app, keeping users connected to their data insights on the go.
Google Cloud’s Looker for Business Intelligence solution is a unified platform designed to streamline business intelligence processes. Looker helps organizations to organize, access, and utilize their business data more effectively. It allows users to create insight-driven workflows and applications, promoting improved productivity and informed decision-making. The platform ensures that users have access to real-time, consistent, and governed views of their data across various clouds, fostering innovation on a large scale. The solution aims to eliminate the complications of data silos and outdated data, simplifying the generation of reports and dashboards through its robust APIs and integrations.
Key features of Looker for Business Intelligence include its proprietary modeling language, LookML, an SQL-based modeling language which enables analysts to define and manage business protocols in a version-controlled data model, using SQL queries to access information efficiently. Looker also offers seamless integration with Looker Studio, enhancing data analysis, exploration, and visualization capabilities with customizable user dashboards. Built on the robust infrastructure of Google Cloud, Looker offers a comprehensive solution for business data intelligence needs.
Microsoft Power BI is a comprehensive business intelligence platform designed to centralize and facilitate data analysis, helping organizations make informed decisions based on real-time analytics and AI insights powered by Microsoft’s Copilot tool. Power BI is equipped with a range of features that aid in transforming raw data into visually engaging and interpretable insights.
Users can easily import datasets from various data sources into the Power BI data hub, creating a secure and reliable repository for all organizational data. The platform supports the creation of clear visual reports and dashboards through a user-friendly interface that is facilitated by a drag-and-drop report builder. These features work together to improve the decision-making process by integrating insights into commonly used applications like Microsoft 365, whilst ensuring data safety and security at all times.
As a Microsoft Platform, Power BI is a part of a broader ecosystem that seeks to drive innovation across organizations. It can be connected to hundreds of other applications, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure, enhancing workflow automation, and enabling the rapid development of business applications and websites. When combined with Azure analytics services, Power BI offers an expansive data analysis capability, with options to analyze large data volumes, and share insights across your organization, unifying data and fostering richer collaborations.
Qlik Sense facilitates the convergence of data across various environments including cloud and hybrid settings. Qlik has a presence in over 100 countries, serving 40,000 active customers. Their BI platform is equipped with AI capabilities to enhance data accessibility and facilitate smarter business decisions. Qlik Sense aims to automate information pipelines and data-driven workflows, thereby providing actionable insights in real time.
Qlik Sense provides data analytics capabilities that enable users to identify key data patterns and insights. This tool is designed to be highly interactive, allowing users to make selections in any object and direction, adjusting the context as needed to unveil new discoveries. Qlik Sense is integrated with both AI and machine learning to extend analytics capabilities, providing automated insight generation, AI-assisted creation, and data preparation. The platform offers multiple deployment options that range from SaaS to on-premises solutions, ensuring that you have comprehensive control over your data and analytics setup, whether in public cloud, private cloud, or on-site. It enables seamless data integration from a wide variety of sources, aiming to offer high-quality visualization and discovery tools.
SAP Analytics Cloud is a comprehensive data management and analytics solution that is designed to facilitate informed decision-making in businesses. This cloud-based platform integrates business intelligence, predictive analytics, and enterprise planning into a single user experience with clearly presented data and analytics. The solution can also integrate with on-premises applications through a live connection, avoiding the necessity of uploading data to the cloud, which promotes a seamless hybrid analytics experience.
The platform is equipped with features such as machine learning and artificial intelligence that guide data discovery and uncover potential patterns and trends, fostering more accurate and quick decision-making processes. Its AI-powered natural-language processing feature enables users to engage in conversational queries, receiving real-time, data-driven responses. SAP Analytics Cloud offers functionalities such as the SAP Digital Boardroom, a next-generation feature that allows industry leaders to assimilate information, overseeing business performance and anticipating future trends visually and intuitively. SAP Analytics Cloud is flexible and scalable, enhancing collaboration and alignment within organizations.
Tableau, developed by Salesforce, is an analytics platform that allows teams to visualize and interpret business data. It integrates AI technologies and CRM functionalities, offering a blend of data management and analytical insight. Tableau automates analysis across all sectors of your data, allowing for an in-depth understanding and a centralized view of various databases. The platform uses AI to provide intelligent predictions and recommendations to guide businesses in finding solutions to critical questions.
Security is a cornerstone of the product, ensuring safe and controlled data sharing through industry-leading security and governance protocols. Tableau provides access to industry-specific business dashboards with the ‘Accelerator’ platform, enabling teams to quickly get up and running with relevant dashboard templates. Tableu can be integrated either on-premises or in cloud apps, including an integration with Slack, encouraging faster business processes and facilitating cross-departmental communication.
TIBCO Spotfire is a multifaceted analytics platform highlighting patterns and trends in data with comprehensive visual dashboards. Providing analysis for both at-rest and in-motion data, it facilitates predictive insights in a scalable and governed environment. Spotfire’s core features center around its immersive visual analytics dashboards, which presents users with a seamless interface for data discovery and insights derived from both historic and real-time data across multi-layer, disparate data sources.
Users can also create custom analytics applications using the Spotfire Mods framework. This offers flexibility and a user-friendly environment for creating interactive analytics apps tailored to specific needs. Spotfire extends its offering with embedded data science and interactive AI, empowering users with custom expressions and data. The platform incorporates both historical and streaming data as part of the same analysis, aiming to provide actionable insights faster. The geo-analytics feature offers an intuitive platform for delving deep into location-based data, providing context and deeper insights. Spotfire simplifies data analysis and automates processes with the help of AI, thereby promoting efficient data management and analysis.
Zoho Analytics is a business intelligence and analytics platform that is designed to integrate seamlessly into various business workflows. This platform provides high-quality data analytics for a range of sources, such as cloud databases and business applications. Zoho Analytics optimizes the data analytics process, with self-service business intelligence capabilities, enabling users to create interactive data visualizations through a simple drag-and-drop interface. The solution uses AI tools, including Natural Language Querying and Machine Learning, to generate accurate analytical insights.
Zoho Analytics also provides an embedded analytics function which allows the integration of BI features into existing application workflows, along with the option to set up custom analytics portals to meet specific business needs. In addition, Zoho Analytics extends its capabilities through marketplace apps (available in the Zoho Marketplace and other third-party platforms). Zoho Analytics has a low total cost of ownership, with transparent licensing and pricing policies. It also provides flexibility in deployment options as it is available in both cloud and on-premise environments.
Analytics And Business Intelligence Platforms: Everything You Need To Know (FAQs)
What Is An Analytics And Business Intelligence Platform?
Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions support users in modeling, analyzing, exploring, and managing their data, as well as collaborating and sharing findings. These solutions also make it possible to properly process and visualize data in order to benefit from the information on offer. This accurate analysis results in well-rounded data-driven decisions for the business.
Business Intelligence solutions offer tools and functionalities that allow users to take their raw data – from databases, emails, videos, survey responses – and transform that data into valuable insights that are easily digestible and can be easily understood by more than just the IT teams. Users of these platforms can create customized dashboards, build data visualizations, display scoreboards, and make comparisons with key performance indicators (KPIs).
With an analytics and business intelligence platform organizations can more easily facilitate strong strategic planning, enact operational improvements, and gain a competitive advantage.
How Does An Analytics And Business Intelligence Platform Work And What Are The Key Features?
These solutions work to take some of the tedious guesswork out of the decision-making process by providing a solid foundation of knowledge on which to plan strategically. This approach gives business leaders a way to make the most intelligent and well-informed decisioned for the business. This is achieved through following these steps:
- Gather data from a variety of sources, both in and outside of the organizations. Companies often have a large volume of data, from hundreds or even thousands of sources, so the platform should provide the necessary tools to connect to sources like databases, cloud storage, spreadsheets, APIs, external data providers, etc. to collect and integrate that collection of data.
- Carry out data cleaning, filtering, merging, and transformation, to ensure that messy raw data ends up in a usable format. Analytics and business intelligence platforms will clean data and check its quality to ensure it can be added into a functional data set. It will also ensure that the data is complaint and formatted correctly.
- Data that has been properly processed and transformed then needs to be stored in a structured format. This data is stored within the platforms database or data warehouse. This centralized repository makes querying and retrieving data for analysis far more efficient.
- Create relationships between various data points using data modeling, which allows for better querying and analysis. To facilitate the most effective data analysis, the analytics and business intelligence platform may employ techniques such as data cubes, star schemas, and other models to get the most information from your data.
- Use the platform’s analytics tools to delve into descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analysis. Leveraging the platforms analytics capabilities allows users to write queries, apply statistical analysis, and – with the help of machine learning algorithms – reveal valuable insights from the data.
- Use data visualizations to understand insights and actionable intelligence. By offering multiple ways of displaying data (through graphs, charts, dashboards, and reports), a wider range of users can understand the analysis. These visualizations not only make the information more widely digestible, they also allow users to identify and then visually represent trends, patterns, and key metrics which can be used to inform decision making later on.
- Set up automated reports and alerts. Doing this automatically removes a tedious task, while ensuring that users are notified automatically when certain conditions and thresholds are met. This ensures that stakeholders remain updated on important developments without delay.
- Performance monitoring and predictive analytics provide users with both real–time monitoring capabilities that enable the tracking of the business’ performance against established KPIs, and allow for the leveraging or historical data to forecast future trends and outcomes. These can help organizations keep on top of making necessary adjustments for the sake of performance and can aid in proactive decision making.
What Are The Benefits Of Using An Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform?
The insights derived from business intelligence and analytics solutions gives organizations the ability to articulate and ask the questions, in simple terms, that they need to be asking of themselves. This means that any decisions they make (and subsequent actions taken) are not just best guesses, but instead are well informed and data driven.
In addition to the informed and strategic decision making that these solutions facilitate, there are further benefits including:
- Gaining a competitive advantage
- Boosting overall efficiency
- Uncovering hidden patterns, correlations, and trends
- Using insights to analyze spending patterns and find cost cutting opportunities
- Gaining better insights into customer behaviors and preferences
- Using historical data to identify potential risks and make adjustments to mitigate them
- Supporting more effective collaboration and data sharing
- Empowering non-technical users to perform data analysis without needing technical support
- Aligning the organizations action with their business goals
- Enhance transparency and meet compliance requirements
- Make more detailed long term plans
- Reduce data complexity by making data more digestible
