Business Intelligence Concepts

Ms. Shikha Saraswat

 Introduction
• The business environment (climate) is constantly changing, and it is
becoming more and more complex.
• Organizations, private and public, are under pressures that force
them to respond quickly to changing conditions and to be innovative
in the way they operate. Such activities require organizations to be
agile and to make frequent and quick strategic, tactical, and
operational decisions, some of which are very complex.
• Making such decisions may require considerable amounts of
relevant data, information, and knowledge.
• Processing these, in the framework of the needed decisions, must
be done quickly, frequently in real time, and usually requires some
computerized support.
 CHANGING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS AND
COMPUTERIZED
DECISION SUPPORT
• Companies are moving aggressively to
computerized support of their operations.
The Business Pressures–Responses–Support
Model
• The Business Pressures–Responses–Support Model, as
its name indicates, has three components:
• business pressures that result from today’s business
climate, responses
• (actions taken) by companies to counter the pressures
(or to take advantage of the opportunities available in
the environment), and
• computerized support that facilitates the monitoring of
the environment and enhances the response actions
taken by organizations.
The Business Pressures–Responses–Support
Model
 THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
• The environment in which organizations
operate today is becoming more and more
complex. This complexity creates
opportunities on the one hand and problems
on the other.
• Business environment factors can be divided
into four major categories: markets, consumer
demands, technology, and societal.
• The intensity of most of these factors increases
with time, leading to more pressures, more
competition, and so on.
• In addition, organizations and departments
within organizations face decreased budgets
and amplified pressures from top managers to
increase performance and profit.
• In this kind of environment, managers must
respond quickly, innovate, and be agile.
 ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES: BE REACTIVE,
ANTICIPATIVE, ADAPTIVE, AND
PROACTIVE
• Both private and public organizations are
aware of today’s business environment and
pressures. They use different actions to
counter the pressures.
• Vodafone New Zealand Ltd (Krivda, 2008), for
example, turned to BI to improve
communication and to support executives in
its effort to retain existing customers and
increase revenue from these customers
 ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES
• Managers may take other actions, including
the following:
• Employ strategic planning
• Use new and innovative business models
• Restructure business processes
• Participate in business alliances
• Improve corporate information systems
• Improve partnership relationships
 ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES
• Encourage innovation and creativity
• Improve customer service and relationships
• Move to electronic commerce (e-commerce)
• Move to make-to-order production and on-demand manufacturing and
services
• Use new IT to improve communication, data access (discovery of
information), and
• collaboration
• Respond quickly to competitors’ actions (e.g., in pricing, promotions, new
products and services)
• Automate many tasks of white-collar employees
• Automate certain decision processes, especially those dealing with customers
• Improve decision making by employing analytics
 CLOSING THE STRATEGY GAP
• One of the major objectives of computerized
decision support is to facilitate closing the gap
between the current performance of an
organization and its desired performance, as
expressed in its mission, objectives, and goals,
and the strategy to achieve them.
 Examples of Large Companies Using
Business Intelligence Successfully – And
What You Can Learn from Them
• From small retail stores to large corporations, data is
shaping the way we do business, from understanding
our customers to streamlining our internal processes.
Organizing raw data so that is useful is a critical part
of this process.
• Once organized, the task of interpreting and analyzing
that data to gain insight paves the way to a gold mine
for businesses. There are powerful tools and
techniques that put these insights at the fingertips of
businesses. That’s what we call Business Intelligence.
 Netflix

• Recently, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated that their biggest competitor is sleep.
You read that right.
• They are so good at what they do, that the only thing stopping their customers
from using their service is the need for sleep. He further said that “When you
watch a show from Netflix and get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re
competing with sleep, on the margin.”
• But what keeps people from coming back to Netflix? The ability to know which
types of show you’re most interested in. After finishing a good movie or series,
Netflix will show you TV shows or movies related or similar to what you’ve
already shown interest in and entice you to watch more, thus preventing you
from cancelling your subscription.
• By fully understanding their customers, even on an individual level, they were
able to provide the products that customers will likely watch. But on a larger
scale, data effectively tells them which TV shows and movies to buy, what to
keep, and what to remove from their roster.
 Amazon

• Amazon, a hybrid tech meets retail company is one of the best examples of
successful use and implementation of Business Intelligence.
• Amazon, one of the key innovators of Big Data and Business Intelligence, not
only provides recommendations based on users’ search and purchase
history (which is what many companies now, like Netflix, do). Amazon will
start the process of shipping a product before you even buy it!
• Anticipatory Shipping, as their patent is called, is the process of shipping an
item to a customer in anticipation of the purchase. Amazon is so confident in
their Big Data that they know you will order a product before you even
confirm it. By the time you click the button to close the sale, your product is
already on its way.
• Harnessing the relationships in their data means that they are not only
making decisions on past events, but can undertake precision forecasting to
drive operations and customer experience.
 Tesco

• For retail stores like Tesco, it’s always a challenge to move things off the
shelf, especially for perishable items that could be wasted.
• To combat this, Tesco introduced its loyalty program with Clubcard
starting in the mid-1990s. This card, while many competitors use it only
to promote discounts and coupons, was used by Tesco to gain insights.
• The results? They were able to increase coupon redemption by 3%-
70%, save almost 100 million pounds in stock that could have been
expired using predictive analytics, and optimise their stock-keeping
system.
• The data they were able to gather helped them form insights about
customer behaviour patterns and have used this information in a lot of
aspects of the business, from marketing to inventory, and probably,
even staff scheduling.
 Focus On Providing Value

• All of these businesses used data to provide

more value to their clients. Whether it’s
recommendation of relevant products, faster
delivery, or tailored mailing and coupon
promotions, their focus was to continuously add
value to their clients’ lives. The opposite is also
true, where many businesses are potentially
harming their customer relationships by ignoring
these signals or offering irrelevant services.
Data-backed Decisions Work – If They Are Accurate

• There are quintillions of data points that can

be gathered every second. But knowing which
data to gather, interpreting it correctly, and
making decisions based on processed data is
the key to making data work.
 What is Business Intelligence?
• BI(Business Intelligence) is a set of processes, architectures, and
technologies that convert raw data into meaningful information that
drives profitable business actions.It is a suite of software and services
to transform data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

• BI has a direct impact on organization's strategic, tactical and

operational business decisions. BI supports fact-based decision
making using historical data rather than assumptions and gut feeling.

• BI tools perform data analysis and create reports, summaries,

dashboards, maps, graphs, and charts to provide users with detailed
intelligence about the nature of the business.
Why is BI important?
 A Brief History of BI
• The term BI was coined by the Gartner Group in the mid-1990s.
• However, the concept is much older; it has its roots in the Management
Information Systems (MIS) reporting systems of the 1970s.
• During that period, reporting systems were static and two dimensional and
had no analytical capabilities.
• In the early 1980s, the concept of executive information systems (EIS)
emerged. This concept expanded the computerized support to top-level
managers and executives.
• Some of the capabilities introduced were dynamic multidimensional (ad hoc
or on-demand) reporting, forecasting and prediction, trend analysis, drill
down to details, status access, and critical success factors (CSFs).
• These features appeared in dozens of commercial products until the mid-
1990s. Then the same capabilities and some new ones appeared under the
name BI.
 A Brief History of BI
• Today, a good BI-based enterprise information
system contains all the information executives
need.
• The original concept of EIS was transformed
into BI.
• By 2005, BI systems started to include artificial
intelligence capabilities as well as powerful
analytical capabilities.
 The Architecture of BI
• A BI system has four major components:
• a data warehouse, with its source data;
• business analytics, a collection of tools for
manipulating, mining, and analyzing the
data in the data warehouse;
• business performance management (BPM)
for monitoring and analyzing performance;
• and a user interface (e.g., a dashboard).
 The Architecture of BI
• The data warehousing environment is mainly
the responsibility of technical staff,
• whereas the analytical environment (also
known as business analytics) is the realm of
business users. Any user can connect to the
system via the user interface, such as a
browser.
• Top managers may also use the BPM
component and also a dashboard.
 DATA WAREHOUSING
• Originally, the data warehouse included only
historical data that were organized and
summarized, so end users could easily view or
manipulate data and information.
• Today, some data warehouses include current
data as well, so they can provide real-time
decision support
 BUSINESS ANALYTICS
• End users can work with the data and information in a data
warehouse by using a variety of tools and techniques. These tools
and techniques fit into two major categories:
• 1. Reports and queries. Business analytics include static and
dynamic reporting,all types of queries, discovery of information,
multidimensional view, drill down to details, and so on.
• 2. Data, text, and Web mining and other sophisticated
mathematical and statistical tools. Data mining is a process of
searching for unknown relationships or information in large
databases or data warehouses, using intelligent tools such as
neural computing, predictive analytics techniques, or advanced
statistical methods
BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
• BPM extends the monitoring, measuring, and comparing of
sales, profit, cost, profitability, and other performance
indicators by introducing the concept of management and
feedback.
• It embraces processes such as planning and forecasting as
core tenets of a business strategy.
• In contrast with the traditional DSS, EIS, and BI, which
support the bottom-up extraction of information from data
• BPM provides a top-down enforcement of corporate-wide
strategy.
 THE USER INTERFACE: DASHBOARDS AND
OTHER INFORMATION BROADCASTING
TOOLS
• Dashboards (which resemble automobile
dashboards) provide a comprehensive visual view of
corporate performance measures (also known as key
performance indicators), trends, and exceptions.
• They integrate information from multiple business
areas.
• Dashboards present graphs that show actual
performance compared to desired metrics; thus, a
dashboard presents an at-a-glance view of the health
of the organization
Dashboard
 Additional Tools
• In addition to dashboards, other tools that
broadcast information are corporate portals,
digital cockpits, and other visualization tools
• Many visualization tools, ranging from
multidimensional cube presentation to virtual
reality, are integral parts of BI systems.
 Styles of BI
• The architecture of BI depends on its applications.
• MicroStrategy Corp. distinguishes five styles of BI and
offers special tools for each.
• The five styles are
• report delivery and alerting;
• enterprise reporting (using dashboards and scorecards);
• cube analysis (also known as slice-and-dice analysis);
• ad hoc queries;
• and statistics and data mining.
 The Benefits of BI
• The major benefit of BI to a company is the ability to
provide accurate information when needed, including a
real-time view of the corporate performance and its parts.
• Such information is a must for all types of decisions, for
strategic planning, and even for survival.
• Thompson (2004) also noted that the most common
application areas of BI are general reporting, sales and
marketing analysis, planning and forecasting, financial
consolidation, statutory reporting, budgeting, and
profitability analysis.
 The Benefits of BI
• AUTOMATED DECISION MAKING
• An ADS is a rule-based system that provides a
solution, usually in one functional area (e.g.,
finance, manufacturing), to a specific repetitive
managerial problem, usually in one industry
• (e.g., to approve or not to approve a request
for a loan, to determine the price of an item in
a store).
 AUTOMATED DECISION MAKING

• ADS initially appeared in the airline industry,

where they were called revenue (or yield )
management (or revenue optimization)
systems.
• Airlines use these systems to dynamically price
tickets based on actual demand.
 AUTOMATED DECISION MAKING

• ADS provide rule-based solutions.

• The following are examples of business rules:
• “If only 70 percent of the seats on a flight from Los Angeles to New
York are sold three days prior to departure, offer a discount of x to non
business travelers,”
• “If an applicant owns a house and makes over $100,000 a year, offer a
$10,000 credit line,”
• and “If an item costs more than $2,000, and if your company buys it
only once a year, the purchasing agent does not need special approval.”
• Such rules, which are based on experience or derived through data
mining, can be combined with mathematical models to form solutions
that can be automatically and instantly applied to problems
 Event-Driven Alerts
• One example of ADS is an event-driven alert, which is a warning or
action that is activated when a predefined or unusual event occurs.
• For example, credit card companies have built extensive predictive
analysis models to identify cases of possible fraud and automatically
alert credit card customers for verification of transactions when
unusual activity is noted (e.g. large purchase in an a typical or foreign
location when the customer does not have a history of such
transactions).
• If a customer makes a large deposit, the bank may make an offer of a
higher interest rate Certificate of Deposit (CD) or investment
automatically.
• Such alerts are also used in generating promotions based on
completion of other purchases.
 INTELLIGENCE CREATION AND USE AND BI
GOVERNANCE
• The process is cyclical with a series of
interrelated steps.
• Analysis is the main step for converting raw
data to decision supporting information.
• However, accurate and/or reliable analysis
isn’t possible unless other steps along the way
have been properly addressed.
 INTELLIGENCE CREATION AND USE AND BI
GOVERNANCE
• Once a data warehouse is in place, the general process of intelligence
creation starts by identifying and prioritizing specific BI projects.
• For each potential BI project in the portfolio, it is important to use
return on investments (ROI) and total cost of ownership measures to
estimate the cost-benefit ratio. This means that each project must be
examined through costing associated with the general process phases
as well as costs of maintaining the application for the business user.
• Additionally, the benefits estimations need to involve end-user
examinations of decision-making impacts, including measures
reflecting benefits like cashflow acceleration.
• Some organizations refer to the project prioritization process as a
form of BI governance
Real-Time, On-Demand BI Is Attainable
• The demand for instant, on-demand access to
dispersed information has grown as the need to
close the gap between the operational data and
strategic objectives has become more pressing.
• The introduction of new data-generating
technologies, such as radio-frequency
identification (RFID), is only accelerating this
growth and the subsequent need for real-time BI.
Real-Time, On-Demand BI Is Attainable
• Traditional BI systems use a large volume of static data that has
been extracted, cleansed, and loaded into a data warehouse to
produce reports and analyses.
• However, the need is not just reporting, since users need
business monitoring, performance analysis, and an
understanding of why things are happening.
• These can provide users, who need to know (virtually in real
time) about changes in data or the availability of relevant reports,
alerts, and notifications regarding events and emerging trends in
Web, e-mail, or instant messaging (IM) applications.
• In addition, business applications can be programmed to act on
what these real-time BI systems
Real-Time, On-Demand BI Is Attainable

• For example, a supply chain management

(SCM) application might automatically place
an order for more “widgets” when real-time
inventory falls below a certain threshold or
• when a customer relationship management
(CRM) application automatically triggers a
customer service representative and credit
control clerk to check a customer who has
placed an online order larger than $10,000.
 Approaches to Real Time BI
• One approach to real-time BI uses the DW
model of traditional BI systems. In this case,
products from innovative BI platform
providers (like Ascential or Informatica)
provide a service-oriented, near-real-time
solution that populates the DW much faster
than the typical nightly extract/transfer/load
(ETL) batch update does
 Approaches to Real Time BI
• A second approach, commonly called business activity
management (BAM), is adopted by pure play BAM and or
hybrid BAM-middleware providers (such as Savvion, Iteration
Software, Vitria, webMethods, Quantive, Tibco, or Vineyard
Software).
• It bypasses the DW entirely and uses Web services or other
monitoring means to discover key business events. These
software monitors (or intelligent agents) can be placed on a
separate server in the network or on the transactional
application databases themselves, and they can use event- and
process-based approaches to proactively and intelligently
measure and monitor operational processes.
 Developing or Acquiring BI Systems

• Today, many vendors offer diversified tools,

some of which are completely
preprogrammed (called shells); all you have to
do is insert your numbers.
• These tools can be purchased or leased.
• For a list of products, demos, white papers,
and much current product information, see
information-management.com/.
 Developing or Acquiring BI Systems

• The issue that companies face is which

alternative to select: purchase, lease, or build.
Each of these alternatives has several options.
• One of the major criteria for making the
decision is justification and cost–benefit
analysis.
Justification and Cost–Benefit Analysis

• Both direct and intangible benefits need to be

identified.
Security and Protection of Privacy
• This is an extremely important issue in the
development of any computerized system,
especially BI that contain data that may
possess strategic value. Also, the privacy of
employees and customers needs to be
protected.
 Integration of Systems and Applications

• With the exception of some small applications,

all BI applications must be integrated with
other systems such as databases, legacy
systems, enterprise systems (particularly ERP
and CRM), e-commerce (sell side, buy side),
and many more.
• In addition, BI applications are usually
connected to the Internet and many times to
information systems of business partners.
 Why is BI important?
• Measurement: creating KPI (Key Performance
Indicators) based on historic data
• Identify and set benchmarks for varied processes.
• With BI systems organizations can identify market
trends and spot business problems that need to be
addressed.
• BI helps on data visualization that enhances the data
quality and thereby the quality of decision making.
• BI systems can be used not just by enterprises but SME
(Small and Medium Enterprises)
 How Business Intelligence systems are
implemented?
• Here are the steps:

• Step 1) Raw Data from corporate databases is extracted. The

data could be spread across multiple systems heterogeneous
systems.

• Step 2) The data is cleaned and transformed into the data

warehouse. The table can be linked, and data cubes are formed.

• Step 3) Using BI system the user can ask queries, request ad-hoc
reports or conduct any other analysis.
Examples of Business Intelligence System
used in Practice
 Example 1:
• In an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system
information that could be fed into product database
could be
• add a product line
• change a product price
• Correspondingly, in a Business Intelligence system
query that would be executed for the product subject
area could be did the addition of new product line or
change in product price increase revenues
 Example 1:
• In an advertising database of OLTP system
query that could be executed
• Changed in advertisement options
• Increase radio budget
• Correspondingly, in BI system query that could
be executed would be how many new clients
added due to change in radio budget
 Example 1:
• In OLTP system dealing with customer
demographic data bases data that could be fed
would be
• increase customer credit limit
• change in customer salary level
• Correspondingly in the OLAP system query that
could be executed would be can customer
profile changes support higher product price
 Example 2:
• A hotel owner uses BI analytical applications to
gather statistical information regarding average
occupancy and room rate. It helps to find
aggregate revenue generated per room.

• It also collects statistics on market share and

data from customer surveys from each hotel to
decides its competitive position in various
markets.
 Example 3:
• A bank gives branch managers access to BI
applications. It helps branch manager to
determine who are the most profitable customers
and which customers they should work on.

• The use of BI tools frees information technology

staff from the task of generating analytical reports
for the departments. It also gives department
personnel access to a richer data source.
 Four types of BI users
• 1. The Professional Data Analyst:

• The data analyst is a statistician who always needs to drill deep down into data.
BI system helps them to get fresh insights to develop unique business strategies.

• 2. The IT users:

• The IT user also plays a dominant role in maintaining the BI infrastructure.

• 3. The head of the company:

• CEO or CXO can increase the profit of their business by improving operational
efficiency in their business.
• 4. The Business Users

• Business intelligence users can be found from across the

organization. There are mainly two types of business users

• Casual business intelligence user

• The power user.
• The difference between both of them is that a power user has
the capability of working with complex data sets, while the
casual user need will make him use dashboards to evaluate
predefined sets of data.
 Advantages of Business
Intelligence
• 1. Boost productivity

• With a BI program, It is possible for businesses to create reports with a single click thus
saves lots of time and resources. It also allows employees to be more productive on their
tasks.

• 2. To improve visibility

• BI also helps to improve the visibility of these processes and make it possible to identify any
areas which need attention.

• 3. Fix Accountability

• BI system assigns accountability in the organization as there must be someone who should
own accountability and ownership for the organization's performance against its set goals.
• 4. It gives a bird's eye view:

• BI system also helps organizations as decision makers get an overall bird's eye view through
typical BI features like dashboards and scorecards.

• 5. It streamlines business processes:

• BI takes out all complexity associated with business processes. It also automates analytics by
offering predictive analysis, computer modeling, benchmarking and other methodologies.

• 6. It allows for easy analytics.

• BI software has democratized its usage, allowing even nontechnical or non-analysts users to
collect and process data quickly. This also allows putting the power of analytics from the
hand's many people.
 BI System Disadvantages
• 1. Cost:

• Business intelligence can prove costly for small as well as for

medium-sized enterprises. The use of such type of system
may be expensive for routine business transactions.
• 2. Complexity:

• Another drawback of BI is its complexity in implementation

of datawarehouse. It can be so complex that it can make
business techniques rigid to deal with.
 BI System Disadvantages
• 3. Limited use

• Like all improved technologies, BI was first established keeping in

consideration the buying competence of rich firms. Therefore, BI
system is yet not affordable for many small and medium size
companies.

• 4. Time Consuming Implementation

• It takes almost one and half year for data warehousing system to be
completely implemented. Therefore, it is a time-consuming process.
 Trends in Business Intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence: Gartner' report indicates that AI and machine learning now
take on complex tasks done by human intelligence. This capability is being leveraged
to come up with real-time data analysis and dashboard reporting.

• Collaborative BI: BI software combined with collaboration tools, including social

media, and other latest technologies enhance the working and sharing by teams for
collaborative decision making.

• Embedded BI: Embedded BI allows the integration of BI software or some of its

features into another business application for enhancing and extending it's reporting
functionality.

• Cloud Analytics: BI applications will be soon offered in the cloud, and more
businesses will be shifting to this technology. As per their predictions within a couple
of years, the spending on cloud-based analytics will grow 4.5 times faster.
 Choosing BI Vendors

• The fundamental criteria in picking the right vendor:

• Vendor experience.
• First of all, it’s important to know the vendor’s
experience in delivering its capabilities to various or
specific industries, business size, and niche.
Experienced vendors are more aware of the common
issues you’ll face and are better equipped in
providing you with the right solution in a timely
fashion.
 Choosing BI Vendors
• Pricing.
• Some companies are more expensive or more
affordable than others. Beyond affordability, it’s
vital to consider the vendor’s overall value and
total cost of ownership. While others may look
more inexpensive at a glance, the costs may add up
with each additional upgrade. Meanwhile, other
products, albeit they appear more expensive, may
already include them in their offerings.
 Choosing BI Vendors
• Implementation speed.
• The duration ranges from a few hours to
months. Factors such as the deployment model, the
complexity of the project, the size of your business,
the number of users and your existing infrastructure
are only some of the things that contribute to the
duration of the entire process. All things considered,
it’s essential to choose a vendor that accomplishes
this in a timely yet solid manner and within your
required timeframe.
 Choosing BI Vendors
• Training and support.
• A key consideration that varies from vendor to vendor
that makes or breaks the success of the BI system’s
implementation. The vendors that made it to the list
offer a rich set of training materials (ranging from
video tutorials, how-to guides, support portals,
knowledge base, documentation, FAQs, and
whitepapers, among others) for their products. They
can also be reached through various channels such as
via phone, email, or live chat to request for support.
List of Business Intelligence Software Companies

• 1. Sisense
 Sisense
• Sisense is known and considered as one of the
leaders in business intelligence. It’s a business
analytics software company founded in 2004 with
products that specialize in the analysis of big data. It
has both back-end and front-end for non-technical
users to analyze large volumes of data sets from
multiple sources powered by in-chip technology
and for creating visualizations (such as reports and
dashboards) on any device including mobile
devices, respectively.
Sisense won Best BI Software of 2018 Award
 Why should you choose Sisense? 

• Sisense has established its name in the BI world

with its top-notch solutions where they garnered
premier rankings in customer satisfaction. It’s easy
to see why—Sisense is powerful. It handles all
types and sizes of data. It’s highly scalable as your
organization accumulates more data and its in-chip
technology easily processes high volumes of data
coming from various data sources so you won’t
have to spend on additional servers and hardware.
2. Looker
• Looker is one of the younger players in the BI
market as it was only established in 2011. However,
the vendor shows potential in quickly adapting to
their customer’s needs and catching up with their
more established competitors. With a core mission
of providing access to consistently defined data to
everyone in your organization, even the average
business user can use its product with ease and
explore data in varying levels of details.
 Why should you choose Looker? 

• If you’re looking for a pared-down yet robust

interface, Looker is a great choice for your
needs. Its browser-based big data interface
operates in the database completely to deliver
analytics to both non-technical and more
advanced users. It also has a proprietary data
modeling language and quick implementation.
3. Infragistics
• Infragistics is a global software company
founded in 1989 that focuses on UI (user
interface) development tools. In addition, it
also branched out to application prototyping
industry, developer support, and UI and UX
training and consulting, among others. It has a
robust BI product called ReportPlus that
enables you to visualize your KPIs with real-
time dashboards and rich interactive reports.
• Product: ReportPlus (Desktop and Mobile,
Server, and Embedded)
 Why should you choose Infragistics?

• Its BI service specializes in business analytics

and data visualization where it’s considered as
one of the best-of-breed software in its niche.
It lets you create, access, and share interactive
dashboards and visualizations in the touch-
enabled app and drag-and-drop features on
any device with true self-service BI.
4. Qlik
• Qlik is a pure BI vendor founded in 1993 with
products for business intelligence and
visualization. Its main product, QlikView, is used
for self-service BI reporting, visual data
discovery, and data dashboards creation and
sharing. The other offering is Qlik Sense for a
more free-form analytics where you can develop
data and web connections with API connections.
• Main products: QlikView; Qlik Sense
 Why you should choose Qlik

• It has two reliable BI products to match your

business intelligence needs. Qlik focuses on
harnessing human intelligence and using BI
tools to amplify it. With that, it’s an effective
solution for self-service data visualization,
embedded analytics and reports, and guided
analytics apps, among others.
5. SAP
• SAP is a Germany-based multinational software
corporation founded in 1972 that develops enterprise
software for handling business and customer relations. It’s
the world’s largest software developer and the third-
largest independent software company by revenue. The
giant IT vendor offers a broad range of BI products that led
the company to dominate the BI and analytics market over
the years. The company’s BI division is called SAP
BusinessObjects which is a suite of front-end applications
for accessing, viewing, and analyzing BI data.
• Main products: SAP Lumira; SAP Crystal Reports
 Why should you choose SAP?

• SAP holds the biggest BI market share because of

its wide range of effective BI solutions aimed
towards various industries and company sizes,
from SMBs to large enterprises. On top of its wide
array of other solutions that you can seamlessly
connect with your BI platform, SAP’s
BusinessObjects products work with multiple data
sources in different formats making it a broad and
robust BI solution with a self-service functionality.
6. Tableau Software
• Tableau Software is a BI company founded in 2003.
Its product, available in Desktop, Server, and
Online, focuses on interactive data visualization. In
addition, Tableau offers two more products to
simplify BI for free: Tableau Mobile (free Tableau
Online/Server mobile companion) and Tableau
Public (free Tableau Desktop/Online version).
• Main product: Tableau (Desktop, Server, and
Online)
 Why should you choose Tableau Software?

• The products of Tableau Software are robust

in drilling down data and visualization for any
types of users. It’s also built for querying
various database types and constructing
visualizations from the results. This can then
be read in a variety of forms (i.e. maps, bar
graphs, and pie charts) to leverage data
discovery and understanding.
7. SAS
• Developed by SAS Institute, SAS is a software
suite for business intelligence, advanced
analytics, predictive analytics, and data
management. It was originally developed from
1966 to 1976 and then further developed during
1980s and 1990s. Its collection of products mine,
modify, handle, and retrieve data from various
sources and then perform statistical analysis.
• Main product: SAS Business Intelligence
 Why should you choose SAS?
• It’s an established company in the BI market.
With various modules included, it offers an
integrated suite for discovering and collecting
enterprise-level data. It integrates with
Microsoft applications and includes real-time
analytics.
8. Microsoft
• One of the Big Four, Microsoft is a popular,
established name in the IT industry. This
multinational tech company is a developer and
manufacturer that supports, licenses, and sells a
variety of services, consumer electronics, and
computer software, among others. It holds one of
the largest market shares in the BI world with its
array of products.
• Main products: Microsoft Power BI; Azure Analysis
Services; SQL Server
 Why should you choose Microsoft?

• Microsoft is a familiar name in many

households and organizations. With that, it’s
reliability and performance has been proven
over time. When it comes to business
intelligence, its product, particularly Power BI,
is a robust visualization tool with a direct
integration with Excel and various other data
sources. It provides great data visibility and
correlates disparate data.
9. IBM
• IBM is another giant IT vendor and member of the Big
Four. IBM itself is a century-old corporation that’s, based
on employee number, recognized as the second largest
US firm. It entered the BI industry after purchasing
Cognos in 2007. Cognos, before it was acquired by IBM,
has been around for years developing BI solutions for
LAN. After its acquisition, IBM Cognos quickly rose as a
BI mega-vendor following the merge of their tech.
• Main product: IBM Cognos (Analytics, Controller, and
Integration Server)
 Why should you choose IBM?

• IBM Cognos has various components and over

30 products for dashboarding, reporting, data
integration, and business intelligence. Its
market edge lies on its flexibility to support
the largest corporate giants and SMBs at the
same time. The apps can be used with
relational and multidimensional data sources
from a wide range of vendors such as
Microsoft and Oracle, among others.
10. Infor
• Infor, a multi-national enterprise software
company, acquired Birst which is a startup
company with a SaaS delivery model for business
intelligence to administer big data integration
and customer analysis in 2017. Founded in 2004,
Birst is considered a young player yet it has
proved to be a reliable BI solution with easy-to-
use tools and robust features.
• Main product: Birst
 Why should you choose Birst?

• Birst has self-service analytics, visual

discovery, mobile tools, and a robust
automated data refinement feature that are
offered at an overall low cost of total
ownership. It has end-user self-service and
enterprise-grade scalability.
11. Domo
• Domo, a computer software company founded
in 2010, develops business intelligence tools and
data visualization services. This vendor is funded
by an A-list of investors, angels, and CEOs of the
world’s biggest Internet and SaaS businesses. It’s
founded by a team of talents from various
industries such as Google, LinkedIn, SAP,
Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
• Main product: Domo
 Why should you choose Domo?

• Geared towards executives and CEOs in various

industries, Domo is a reliable choice in building a
digitally-connected organization. It shines in enabling
users to access information and reports from a single
platform and connecting data with a wide array of
connectors.
• Since it’s a cloud-based solution, Domo’s
implementation process is shorter. It can take up to
one to two months or even shorter based on your
company’s requirements and scale.
12. GoodData
• GoodData was founded in 2007 by NetBeans
and Systinet founder and CEO Roman Stanek.
It delivers an end-to-end cloud analytics for
companies of all data enterprises. The
platform helps users produce on-demand
reports by aggregating separate data sets and
putting them together.
• Main product: GoodData
 Why should you choose GoodData?

• GoodData offers a unique solution that’s

available as a PaaS through the vendor’s
cloud-based Open Analytics Platform. The
system gives your IT data governance for
infrastructure maintenance and security while
non-technical users get autonomy for building
reports and dashboards.
• it’s a Platform-as-a-Service solution.
13. iDashboards
• iDashboards is a tech company with software-
based BI dashboard solutions. It offers a fully-
customizable data management and
visualization tool with a cloud-based version
and supplementary visualization tools to
support its primary products.
• Main product: iDashboards
 Why should you choose iDashboards?

• iDashboards is known as a cost-effective

alternative to other BI products due to its
offering of a low cost of total ownership and
licensing. It also has a fast-paced mechanism
for transforming data into interactive
dashboards with just a few clicks.
14. Chartio
• Chartio is a BI company that’s fairly young.
With that, its offerings are not as advanced or
complex as more established BI solutions.
That’s why its market is mostly geared towards
startups and SMBs with limited budget and
accelerated growth, where they shine on their
BI solutions.
• Main product: Chartio
 Why should you choose Chartio?

• If you’re a startup or small or medium-sized

business owner with a limited budget, Chartio
is a reliable option that offers cloud-based
data exploration for both users with less BI
experience and more seasoned analysts. The
interface is simple yet comprehensive for data
analytics.
• it’s a cloud-based application.
15. Attivio, Inc.
• Attivio is a software company founded in 2007 that
develops solutions for data analytics and access.
AIE (Active Intelligence Engine), Attivio’s flagship
product, is developed to merge data warehousing,
analytics, query, and business intelligence for an
all-in-one data solution. It also has an embedded
version to embed the same functionalities on a
variety of business applications.
• Main product: Attivio Active Intelligence Engine
 Why should you choose Attivio?

• It’s a strong choice if you’re looking for a BI

solution that focuses on natural language
processing and AI-powered search and text
analytics. Its focal point on utilizing artificial
intelligence makes it stand out from its
competitors.
16. Oracle
• Oracle, a member of BI market’s Big Four, is an
IT vendor with a BI platform. It’s the second
largest software maker based on revenue. The
Oracle Business Intelligence offers a portfolio
of applications that pioneered the integrated,
end-to-end Enterprise Performance
Management System.
• Main BI product: Oracle BI
 Why should you choose Oracle?
• Oracle is indisputably a reliable and robust
vendor of BI solutions with its arsenal of
software products for the niche. It’s an all-in-
one solution with big data capability for
various purposes ranging from future planning
to setting and tracking specific goals.
18. Thoughtspot
• Founded by a team of engineers in 2012,
ThoughtSpot is a tech company that creates BI
analytics search software. Its main product is a
search and AI-driven analytics platform which
specializes in performing a search to access
and analyze data in seconds.
• Main product: Thoughtspot
 Why should you choose ThoughtSpot? 

• ThoughtSpot specializes in enabling analytics

at a “human scale,” hence, it’s a good choice
for non-technical users. It also works like a
search engine where users type in key terms
in a search box and get results of matching
visualizations to simplify analysis of data,
creating reports, and building dashboards
without the help of an IT specialist.
19. Pentaho
• Pentaho is a company that develops business
analytics support software. While it has an
array of applications for data mining, data
integration, and data access, among others, its
core product is the Pentaho Business Analytics
Platform. The company was founded in 2004
and released their BI suite a year later.
• Main product: Pentaho
 Why should you choose Pentaho? 

• Pentaho is considered as the first vendor to

market direct reporting for NoSQL. It’s also a
reliable solution for combining data
integration and analytical processing. The
unification of end users and IT makes for an
easy and effective information visualization
and integration.
 20. ScrapeStorm

• Created by Kuaiyi Technology Corp., ScrapeStorm

has made its name in the industry by helping
businesses self-sufficiently leverage the power of
artificial intelligence to make better sense of their
data. Their platform is mainly designed as a data
scraping tool where users can identify, extract, and
consolidate large data from various sources with
minimal friction and help users produce
comprehensive excel reports with ease.
• Main product: ScrapeStorm
 Why should you choose ScrapeStorm?

• The product makes it easy for businesses to extract large

amounts of data from various sources and store them on
a centralized platform, allowing teams to accessibly utilize
key metrics. Basically, you will no longer have to request
your IT department to assist you in collecting data from
your web pages.
• Being a cloud-hosted platform, it can be quickly
implemented and utilized to extract data and generate
reports. ScrapeStorm was also designed to help
businesses acquire insights and access key data without
the need for coding expertise.