Business Intelligence(BI) products analysis
Definitions:
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process
for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate
executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business
decisions. Companies that build data warehouses and use business intelligence
for decision-making ultimately save money and increase profit. It may include
various steps like extracting the data, transforming data into different forms
for analyzing uniformly, finding appropriate metrics to analyse the data and
make it presentable in a visually appealing way and that all the business users
can understand easily.
Hitherto, all the analysis tasks in organizations were done
mostly manually with intuition and with basic tools like Microsoft excel,
Oracle or SQL Server etc., These were used to extract the data and do some
computational and aggregation analyses of various performance metrics. But due
to rapid advancement of technology and new standalone tools coming into market every
day, business intelligence has undergone rapid improvements in the way analysis
is done.
Analysis:
With the numerous products in BI space available to users in
the market, selecting one for an organization becomes cumbersome and creates a
lot of confusion. In this context I would like to provide a framework for
analysis of these tools by defining five point important criteria to compare
these tools on. There are many points that can be used to compare this tools
like cost/pricing, compatible data sources, relevant industry customizations,
storage capabilities, analytical features – types of visualizations, data
security, customer service & support, performance at higher loads etc., But
for the context of this analysis, I will consolidate all these points into five
main areas.
Methodology:
After the five important criteria are selected, each of the
five different tools will be analysed on each criteria and will be given a
rating on 1 to 5 on each criteria. Weightage will be assigned to each criteria
and a final weighted score is taken and the best tool from my analysis can be
discerned from the overall weighted score it achieved.
Five important criteria with corresponding weightages are:
·
Integration with multiple data sources – 25%
·
Richness of analytics & visualization
functions -30%
·
Cost/Pricing – 20%
·
Customer Support Capabilities – 10%
·
Data/Cloud Storage – 15%
Products analysis:
1)
Qlikview:
Qlik is a software company based in Radnor,
Pennsylvania. Qlik is the provider of QlikView and Qlik Sense, business
intelligence & visualization software. Qlik (previously known as QlikTech)
was founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993 as a software company in business
intelligence (BI).
Integration Capabilities:
Combine and analyze data from databases,
spreadsheets, websites, and custom sources. Associate data from different
vendors and suppliers. Load data from disparate sources in the same
application. Gain extensive insight into your divergent data. It supports all
the popular data sources.
Richness of analytics & visualizations:
QlikView is probably of the few
visualization tools that offers an integrated BI platform and comes bundled
with adequate demos, training manuals, and tutorials that can easily fascinate
clients and new customers, giving them insight in a fraction of the time they
expect. Qlikview is easily deployable and configurable, and starts producing
stunning reports within minutes of installation. QlikView’s patented
“associative technology” ensures that the users derive intelligence and
insights on demand.
Cost/Pricing:
Each private user on QlikView
is $1,350 and concurrent users are $15,000. A server license is $35,000. Other
services are available at an additional cost. So it is also a pricey option for
private user and costs more than Tableau
Customer Support:
Qlik offers very good
technical and non-technical support. Technical product support can be accessed
online, and its services have received amazing reviews by Qlik customers. The
non-technical support offered by Qlik, has an international, online support
staff that helps to address issues such as license-related questions, portal
access issues, download issues, and other general questions.
Cloud Storage:
Qlik Sense Cloud is a SaaS
service that allows users to work seamlessly from desktop to tablet to
smartphone, while it automatically adapts to the device. Data in Qlik Sense
Cloud is encrypted in flight and secured at rest.
2)
Pentaho:
Again a BI exclusive company founded in
2004 at Orlando, Pentaho became very popular in recent times, Pentaho,
distinguishes itself in its unique ability to combine data integration with
analytical processing, which saves users both money and time. This vastly
speeds up the results process, an ever-more prescient issue for buyers on the
market for a new BI tool.
Integration Capabilities:
Pentaho data
integration prepares and blends data to create a complete picture of your
business that drives actionable insights. The complete data integration
platform delivers accurate, “analytics ready” data to end users from any
source. With visual tools to eliminate
coding and complexity, Pentaho puts big data and all data sources at the
fingertips of business and IT users alike.
Richness of analytics & visualizations:
Pentaho relies on powerful visualizations that allow users to interact with
their data, zooming in and seeing in detail important statistics. Some other
tools that highlight this feature include lasso filtering, drill-through
capabilities, and attribute highlighting. Pentaho also has other unique
abilities such as geo-mapping, heat grids, and scatter charts. The system
relies on in-memory data caching, which provides analysis of data at the
"speed of thought," making for a vastly quicker BI tool. Dashboards
are interactive as well, and include web-based drag and drop capabilities and a
library of filter controls. They can be custom designed, so that each is
precisely created for the needs of the user at hand. The dashboard also can
connect business analytics with outside applications, making for a more
efficient user experience.
Cost/pricing:
Gold-level support pricing,
as Pentaho calls it, for one module (reporting, analysis, dashboards, data
integration or data mining) is $11,000 per year for up to four CPUs. For
personal users, it is one of the economical options available to get accustomed
with awesome BI tools and visualizations.
Customer Support:
Pentaho's user community
has been touted as being one the most informative and helpful on the market,
and this is one of the vendor's best support tools. However, there are a number
of other service options available. A visualizations custom UI assistance team
helps users create custom visualizations and UI designs. Pentaho offers
consulting services to customers, which create pre-packaged and custom
engagements to help develop and implement tactics quickly and smoothly. More
hard technical support packages are available, and these include issue
detection, problem resolution, and developer assistance.
Cloud Storage:
Pentaho on Amazon Web
Services provides scalable, high-performance solutions for blending,
orchestrating, and analyzing big data in the cloud. With the Pentaho platform,
large volumes of diverse data can be ingested into Amazon Elastic MapReduce
(EMR) and other hosted Hadoop distributions, then transformed, refined, and
immediately pushed into Amazon Redshift. Business users and analysts are then
offered a full spectrum of analytics including interactive data visualization,
reporting, dashboards and advanced and predictive analytics.
3)
Microstrategy:
MicroStrategy, Inc. is a provider
of business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services. The
company is based in the Washington, D.C. area and serves companies and
organizations worldwide. Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor and Sanju Bansal,
the firm develops software to analyze internal and external data in order to
make business decisions and to develop mobile apps.
Integration Capabilites:
With a variety of out-of-the-box connectors,
MicroStrategy can tap into nearly any type of data, from spreadsheets, to
Salesforce, to big data sources like Hadoop. Easily blend data from multiple
sources for fast, easy analysis. Without any scripting or coding, quickly drag
and drop data to define relationships across tables or sources in seconds.
Connect live to a data source to instantly access the most up-to-date data or
optimize performance and enable offline analysis with in-memory cubes.
Richness of analytics & Visualizations:
MicroStrategy comes with a large, flexible, and easily extensible library of
interactive graphs, advanced visualizations, and maps that make understanding
your data easier than ever before. Maximize the impact of your business
applications with powerful, advanced, and predictive analytics. MicroStrategy
provides an extensive library of native analytical functions and scoring
algorithms, along with an SDK to integrate with 3rd-party and open source
statistical and data mining products.
Cost/Pricing:
Web and Mobile are priced at
$600 per named user or $300,000 per CPU core, while Server is $1,200 per named
user or $600,000 per CPU core. It is a good economical option for a personal
user after recent price cuts.
Customer Support:
Customers who have a
current maintenance contract or who are in their evaluation period have access
to Technical Support and online resources. MicroStrategy Support Site is a
first step to resolve their issue. Customers may also find helpful information
on the MicroStrategy Community. If further assistance is needed, the customer's
designated Support Liaisons may contact Technical Support to log a new support
case using the Support Site, email, telephone or fax information listed below
for where their licenses were transacted.
Cloud Storage:
MicroStrategy Cloud is a
cloud-based platform-as-a-service offering that allows businesses to build and
deploy their own MicroStrategy Analytics-based business intelligence
applications, without investing in infrastructure. Analytics Express runs on
the MicroStrategy Cloud, which also supports deployment of the company's Usher,
Alert and Mobile products.
4)
Tableau:
Founded in 2003 and headquartered in
Seattle, Tableau is a business intelligence software company with a BI tool by
going by same name as flagship product. It is one of the popular tools which
pioneered the user friendly interface that can be easily understood by business
and non technical users.
Integration Capabilities :
Tableau makes it
easy to incorporate multiple data sources. Adding additional layers of data is
as simple as a single click, facilitating the drive of many businesses to
utilize as much data as possible. Tableau has native connectors to many common
databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Teradata, Oracle, EMC
Greenplum, HP Vertica, and more.
Richness of analytics & visualizations:
Tableau allows non-experts to access and create dashboards without formal
training. Tableau Desktop is of their flagship products that relies on
innovative technology that allows users to click on data and drag and drop it
where you want it so that you can analyze exactly what you want.
Cost/Pricing:
Tableau is on the pricy end
for personal users, and even for professional users. But this is to be expected
for software with this range of features. A private license on Tableau ranges
from $999 to $1,999 per user, and gets more expensive depending on server and
data access. One can use a free desktop version, but the data you use will be
made public.
Customer Support:
Tableau also offers a
Desktop Kickstart service, a one time, one-on-one consultation session with an
expert on the subject of the user's choice, ranging from dashboard actions to
publishing and sharing. There are online training sessions that are
self-taught, as well as classroom sessions with an instructor. Tableau offers
support services for all of their products, including an extensive online
database of resources that users can search for answers to their issues.
"Quick start guides" that address many fundamental issues can be
downloaded in one click.
Cloud Storage:
Tableau offers robust cloud
storage options. It enables to view dashboards from the office, at home or on
the road. Filter data, drill down or add entirely new data to your analysis.
Get to the bottom of all those questions your existing reports didn’t
anticipate. Edit any existing view, on the web. And do it all with Tableau’s
blazing-fast data engine so you get your answers when you ask for them.
5)
Jaspersoft:
Jaspersoft was originally called
Panscopic, and was founded by Al Campa, CEO, and Raj Bhargava, VP of Products
in 2001. Jaspersoft provides commercial software around the JasperReports
product, and negotiate contracts with software developers that wish to embed the
JasperReports engine into a closed source product. Tibco acquired Jaspersoft in
2014.
Integration capabilities:
Options to combine
operational data stored in relational databases with Big Data sources are provided
by Jaspersoft. Blending data through the innovative data virtualization
metadata layer or combining into a traditional data warehouse using ETL is also
possible. Natively connect and visualize data for Hadoop Analytics, MongoDB
Analytics, Cassandra Analytics and more. Build Business Intelligence reports,
dashboards and analytics directly from these data stores, without having to
move the data to another database.
Richness of Visualization & Analytics:
Jaspersoft's
data analytics software is used to model, manipulate and visualize any flavor
of data using OLAP or in-memory analysis in order to identify issues, spot
trends and make better decisions quickly. Embedded analytics solutions can help
make an application more competitive; giving end users the reporting and
analytics they need to make better decisions.
Cost/Pricing:
JasperSoft
Professional costs 4 Core Single Instance & unlimited users with Premium
Support at $37500 per year and Standard Support for 29000USD/year.
Customer Support:
The community is
helpful. Mixed reviews about support though – while some have complained about
bad support with no solution offe1red, others have vouched for its superior
support. Might have to do with support contract.
Cloud Storage:
Jaspersoft for AWS
is a Business Intelligence solution available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
Unlike any other SaaS or Cloud Business Intelligence tools on the market, you
can buy by the hour, paying only for what you use.
Weighted Average Comparision:
So
knowing about all the important criteria of each tool, its time to compare them
on a common platform by a weighted average model as below:
Criteria
|
Weightage
|
Qlikview
|
Pentaho
|
MicroStrategy
|
Tableau
|
Jaspersoft
|
Integration
Capabilities
|
25%
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
5
|
2
|
Richness of
analytics & Visualizations
|
30%
|
4
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
3
|
Cost/Pricing
|
20%
|
4
|
5
|
3
|
3
|
4
|
Customer Support
|
10%
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
4
|
4
|
Cloud Storage
|
15%
|
4
|
3
|
5
|
5
|
3
|
Weighted Points
|
100%
|
3.9
|
3.75
|
4.05
|
4.5
|
3.05
|
Rank
|
|
3
|
4
|
2
|
1
|
5
|
Conclusion:
On observation of the above scores, we can see
that Tableau and Microstrategy are the
best of the lot according to the
criteria and analysis defined by me. Also there can be many other important
criteria which are specific to what an organization or individual are looking
for and what their legacy systems are.
References:
http://www.softwareadvice.com/bi/?more=true#more
http://www.docurated.com/all-things-productivity/50-best-business-intelligence-tools
http://www.qlik.com/products/qlik-sense/qlik-cloud
http://bridgei2i.com/blog/epic-blog-battles-of-bi-jaspersoft-vs-tableau/
https://www.experfy.com/blog/microstrategy-vs-tableau-whos-ahead-bi-race
https://www.experfy.com/blog/pentaho-vs-tableau-comparison-visualization-dashboards
http://www.tableau.com/
http://www.pentaho.com/
https://www.jaspersoft.com/
https://www.experfy.com/blog/qlikview-vs-tableau-review-two-visualization-giants/
https://community.qlik.com/thread/102063
http://www.tableau.com/gartner-magic-quadrant-2015
