Business Intelligence tools Analysis

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