BI Product Analysis

Business Intelligence & Analysis Products Scan & Evaluation

This is my first blog in a series of blogs coming up on Business Intelligence (BI). I should also warn you, I am not an experienced blogger, so you will have to bear with me as I work on improving my blogging skills. Now, you have been given a fair warning so gear up, for what’s coming next. Today I am going to share some insights on a very interesting topic “Business Intelligence & Analysis Products Scan & Evaluation”.

Yeah, I know it sounds boring, but trust me, it’s going to get better. Before I begin, let’s understand what BI means. Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. Let’s look at an example:

One major soda company used dashboards to view their international sales. They quickly noticed one region where sales had significantly dropped, and upon clicking on that area they saw that it was due to a local competitor with a new drink. They quickly created a new product to compete with the local business, and saw their sales numbers return to normal.

How cool is that!

Well, there are several tools (probably in 100’s) out there in the market which provide a variety of features and interesting tools and techniques. How do we choose the best for our businesses?

Let us consider following 5 BI vendors for analyses

1. MICROSOFT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

2. TABLEAU BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

3. MICROSTRATEGY

4. ORACLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ENTERPRISE EDITION (OBIEE)

5. SAS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Criteria for selecting a BI Vendor or a Product

Choosing a BI vendor is all about finding the right fit. This requires an understanding of not only the BI marketplace, but also your own business and your organization’s needs. What are your company’s most pressing issues? How can a BI platform solve these challenges?

Developing use cases, or real world examples of ways in which the software could be implemented, will help you ask the right questions and make the right choice.

Before investigating potential BI solutions, it is important to understand how the platform will be implemented, and understand the people that will be using it. For today’s discussion, I will be exploring following criteria to evaluate my top 5 BI tools:

1. Customer support:  All BI products have their problems, and no vendor’s software is immune to bugs (although some vendors do seem to have higher software quality standards than others). When a problem arises, customers can reasonably expect to contact the technical support to resolve the problems. In some cases, this may be in form of some work around, and in others, it may be a matter of waiting for a software patch or new product release. Communication about the status of a resolution and built-in escalation procedures are both important. Customers do have a responsibility here to ensure they are using the software in a supported environment and to report problems in a clear way that can be readily documented. Support should never be considered as a replacement for training and reading quality documentation.

Weightage: Thus, I think a 25% weight-age should be given to customer support when considering a BI tool.

Analysis: As per my analysis Microsoft and Tableau provide excellent support, Microsoft does a good job and finally Oracle and SAS do a decent job at support.

2. Pricing and packaging:  BI pricing and packaging continues to be confusing for BI buyers and, in many cases, unnecessarily complex. Most vendors offer named user licensing, server based, or a combination of the two. There may be special packaging for departmental or SMB deployments.

Scores on this criterion reflect pricing transparency,  degree of complaints from customers about inconsistency and confusing packaging policies and obviously the relative costs.

Weightage: Since this is one of the major factors when selecting a COTS product, I have given a weight-age of 25%

Analysis: As per my analysis Tableau does the best job in terms of pricing and packaging followed by the rest of the herd.

3. Business Query:  This module is often referred to as to as "ad hoc query", but such terminology  is misleading. Unable to wait weeks or months for IT to develop a new report, business user often demands the ability to create queries and reports themselves. The business environment changes at a rapid pace; information requirements can change as correspondingly fast. Business query tools facilitate a self-service reporting environment and allow business users to answer their own questions and do their own analysis. This module assumes that the data mart has been established and that IT has developed a business view to the physical tables.

Weightage: In the world of business analysis this is a very crucial factor and thus I have given a 20% weight-age.

Analysis: As per my analysis MicroStrategy has an excellent module and the rest of the herd more or less does good.

4. Dashboards:  A dashboard is a visual form of information display, which is used to monitor what's currently going on in the business at a glance. Any tool that can display multiple objects from multiple data sources, then, can correctly be referred to as a dashboard. A dashboard has to meet several criteria based on user tastes. However, as minimum following features are basic: interactive design, visually appealing, supporting insight into action, maps, gauges, trend line and cross tab functionality.

Weightage: This is one of  the common features that every vendor produces. Also, this is one of the must haves in a BI tool. So I have decided to give a weight-age of 15%.

Analysis: Being a basic feature for any BI tool, every vendor does a good job at visualization. Some of them have been really innovative with their dashboards. For the current set of vendors I would rate them to be equally good at this.

5. Predictive Analysis: Predictive analysis is used in a variety of forward-looking applications such as fraud detection, customer scoring, risk analysis, and campaign management. Predictive analysis and the task of creating predictive models are reserved for specialist users, with SAS and SPSS leading the market. In an effort to make BI more actionable, some BI vendors are incorporating predictive analytics into their BI suite. This module is still new to the world of BI tool, however it has potential to become mainstream.

Weightage: I think this is a useful tool to have with your BI tool and that's why I have decided to give a weight-age of 15%

Analysis: As per my analysis Tableau does provide this capability where as the rest of the herd does a decent job at this.

Snapshot of Weighted Analysis

Detailed View

Conclusion and Recommendations: Microsoft may emerge as the winner of this competition. However, this doesn't mean that they are the best player in the game. Like I discussed in the beginning choosing a BI vendor is all about finding the right fit. This requires an understanding of not only the BI marketplace, but also your own business and your organization’s needs.

So do your homework before you decide on a BI tool for your organization !

Thank you for reading my blog, please post your comments, suggestions and your take on BI in the section below. Kudos!


References:
1. http://www.jenunderwood.com/2014/03/16/analyzing-gartners-2014-magic-quadrant-for-bi-and-analytics-platforms/
2. http://www.docurated.com/all-things-productivity/50-best-business-intelligence-tools
3. https://www.microstrategy.com/Strategy/media/downloads/about-us/MicroStrategy-BI-Scorecard-Summary-Q4-2012.pdf