Business Intelligence & Analysis Products Scan & Evaluation

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is described as "the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes".  BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data.
Simply put, BI allows easy interpretation of large volume of data and take intelligent business decision based on the interpretation.

There are several Business Intelligence and Analytics tools and platform, available in the market, which makes taking an intelligent decision much easier.
However, one needs to comprehensively evaluate a BI tool, taking various criteria into account, before choosing it for an organization and invest in it. Criterias such as data visualization capability, scalability and so forth must be considered before choosing the best fit for the organization.
This blog discusses the top five most popular Business Intelligence & Analysis products used today and evaluate these products based on certain criteria and rate them based on weight of each criteria.

Criteria used for comparing BI tools

• Data visualization
  One of the most important feature in BI tool is data visualization. This criterion is the capability of BI tool to represent data, to their audiences, in the most interactive way possible. The tool should use vibrant visual objects, images, charts and interactive dashboard having informative visualization. The visual representation of data should be such that, for even a non-technical users, it is easier to understand
• Scalability
  This criterion is the ability of the BI tool to handle growing amount of data, growing amount of users and its potential to be enlarged. BI tool should be scalable enough to add additional functionalities based on the business requirement. Business settings are susceptible to change, a good BI tool should perform well when even when business settings are changed rapidly
• Cost effectiveness 
  Cost is another important factor which needs to be considered while choosing a BI tool. This criterion is based upon return on investment or value for money, in other words, number of features provided by the BI tool for the price that is charged.
  The cost of a BI tool includes the following factors:
• License costs
• Cost of BI developer
• Training costs
• Support/Maintenance fees
• Data Integration
  This criterion is the capability of the BI tool to handle multiple data sets, originating from multiple data sources. These sources include XML data, MS Excel data, MySQL or Oracle Database, Siebel, SAP database, flat files, etc. The variety of sources from where data is being collected is ever increasing, it is vital for a BI tool to be regularly updated, to support multiple data sources and format.
• Customer Experience/ Ease of Use
  This is a measure of how easy it is for the users to get used to the product and produce some meaningful output. The users should require minimal training to use the BI tool.This criteria also includes help and support documentation provided by the vendor

Business Intelligence Tools


1. Tableau



Strengths:

• Supports data integration from various sources 
• Wide range of dashboard capabilities
• Drag and drop easy to use interface
• Row level data security
• Cost is comparatively less than other tools
• High quality customer support to quickly resolve any issues

Weakness:

• Lacks a robust security system
• Lacks support of APIs
• Less support for custom modification and 3rd party plugins
• Limited functionality for data mining

Product Analysis:

Data visualization
All features are dynamic, interactive and highly customizable. One of the best tool available

Scalability
Issues with large volume of data

Cost effectiveness
Tableau is free for students and commercial version cost around $2000. Training is provided free of cost

Data Integration
Can handle variety of data sets easily



2. MicroStrategy

Strengths:

• Ability to generate enterprise reporting, dashboards and notifications
• Ad-Hoc reporting is supported
• Mobile application to allow user to create reports on mobile phones
• Enterprise grade cyber security to provide object level security
• Multiple data-sources are supported 

Weakness:

• Visualization effects are not that good as compared to other tools
• Not easy for business and non-technical users
• Product cost is higher compared to other tools offering the same feature set
• Structured data warehouse is needed for integration

Product Analysis:

Data visualization
Reports lack visual appeal, also takes longer time to generate

Scalability
Highly scalable, can handle data up-to 17 TB easily

Cost effectiveness
The cost of the tool is reasonable and is around $3000

Data Integration
Can integrate with excel, hadoop and other big data sets. Excellent data integration

3. QLIKView

Strength:

• Quickest implementation time and exceptional performance in vital BI projects
• Ability to easily handle complex ETL
• Excellent tool for data discovery, can dive deep into data for analysis
• Excellent visualization features and easy to use user interface

Weakness:

• Not very scalable
• Few tasks require steep learning curve, not suited to business users
• Server deployment could be expensive
• Not good for real time reporting

Product Analysis:

Data visualization
One of the best BI tools for data visualization. Closely follows Tableau

Scalability
QLIK is highly scalable, supports large data-sets and thousands of users

Cost effectiveness
QLIK costs around $4000 and $1000 per additional user

Data Integration
QLIK can work with multiple data-sets with ease, better than Tableau in this criteria

4. Oracle BI

Strength:

• Supports Big Data
• Good detailed user documentation
• User friendly interface
• Excellent customer support and training
• Ability to analyze large data-sets in short amount of time 

Weakness:

• Not easily customizable, requires significant amount of time for custom requirement
• Lack support for multiple data-sources

Product Analysis:

Data visualization
Oracle is good in handling large sets of data, it was primarily developed to process large scale system of record requirements, it is still not good in data visualization

Scalability
Oracle has a scalable architecture, it is a enterprise level tool and it handles large amount of data.

Cost effectiveness
A major drawback of Oracle BI is its high cost

Data Integration
Oracle BI is primarily uses SQL databases and is limited in processing multiple databases


5. SAS BI

Strength:

• Easy and fast reporting
• Supports advanced techniques like prediction modelling and data mining 
• Data integration is excellent
• Huge market share
• Support of other programming languages like R

Weakness:

• Cost is higher compared to other BI tools
• User interface is not so user friendly
• No hardware architecture support

Product Analysis:

Data visualization
SAS has good amount of features for data visualization

Scalability
SAS is highly scalable, it can operate on multiple operating platforms like Linux/Unix, Windows, etc.

Cost effectiveness
Cost of using SAS is too high, servers cost around $8000 and $1700 is charged for any additional user

Data Integration
SAS can handle mupltiple data sources like MySQL, Hadoop, flat siles, etc.



Weight score analysis of BI tools

Criteria	Weight	Tableau	SAS	QLIK	MicroStrategy	Oracle
Data visualization	30.00%	10	8	10	6	6
Scalability	15.00%	8	10	8	8	10
Cost effectiveness	20.00%	8	8	7	7	7
Data Integration	20.00%	8	8	8	8	6
Customer Experience	15.00%	10	8	10	9	8
Points	100.00%	8.9	8.3	8.7	7.35	7.1
Rank		1	3	2	4	5

After carefully analyzing each BI tools and comparing them on the basis of Data visualization, Scalability, Cost effectiveness, Data Integration and Customer Experience. We see that Tableau is clearly a better tool than the other four BI tools. However, as we can see all the five tools are close enough to compete against each other and each of them has their own unique set of features, the choice of selecting a BI tools will eventually depend on specific set of features that the user is looking for


References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence
http://www.qlik.com/
http://www.microstrategy.com/us/
http://www.tableau.com
http://www.sas.com/en_us/home.html
http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/business-analytics/business-intelligence/foundation-suite/overview/index.html
http://www.cio.com/article/2439504/business-intelligence/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2ADAAYM&ct=150223&st=sb