If we break the term ‘Business Intelligence’ in two segments and inspect the portions closely, business and intelligence are two unique fields that did not go hand in hand even a couple of decades back. No matter how big a business would have been in the past, streamlining market reports and carrying out statistical analysis were entirely left up to manual labor. As a result, the entire mechanism of transforming the raw data into a highly functional information took away a lot of precious time.
However, the recent emergence of business intelligence tools have completely transformed the ways both big brands and SMBs do business. The primary function of business intelligence (or BI) tools is to take over the task from human resources, and become more precise and timely in delivering reward-winning results. In short, a technology-driven process that can function faster to perform tedious tasks – from bench-marking and complex event processing to data mining and online analytical processing – and help business owners and corporate managers make quicker decisions and grow exponentially.
We have been experiencing a recent flurry of effective BI tools, but you must be aware of the best in the business in order to be one-step ahead of your competitors. With the first quarter of 2015 about to be over, let us look at the most efficient BI tools that has made people go gaga over the last 3 months.
#1. BOARD
When a BI tool has names like Giorgio Armani, Puma and US Navy as its present users, there is absolutely no way one can deny its authority. Be it a pharmaceutical company or an architectural firm, the biggest advantage of BOARD as a BI tool is its adaptability to work for a variety of industries. BOARD works best when it comes to examining performance of company departments, carrying out multi-dimensional analysis and housing a tremendous amount of data.
#2. Birst
Similar to BOARD, Birst is also designed to serve a variety of companies. It specializes in proving top-notch user experience, by combining the accuracy of an enterprise-capable BI system and the flexibility of a SaaS system. A highly agile and fast BI tool, Birst makes it easy to review market data and take considerable decisions. In addition to its numerous features, companies can use Birst as both an on-premise system as well as a cloud-based system.
#3. IBM Cognos
There are 2 things that make a BI stand out from the crowd – one is availability as both a cloud-based and on-premise system and the second is high scalability. The IBM Cognos BI Software is designed to deliver exactly that! Even when the market data is in their rawest state, IBM Cognos has proved itself efficient in churning out valuable information time and again. The dashboard also offers interesting features like trend analysis, advanced analysis and what-if analysis… all along with social networking features.
#4. SiSense
It has been so long in this post, but I’ve not mentioned a BI tool that can be used even by first-time users. I’m sorry for being late… but here is the solution: Sisense. The developers of SiSense have focused on keeping lengthy implementation or training away in order to make it super user-friendly. On the other hand, they have put greater pressure on making it simpler to support and manage data through an abundance of easy-to-make reporting, visuals and analytics.
#5. Pentaho
Big Data has become a huge thing in recent marketing scenario, and it is crucial for a BI tool to offer users the chance to integrate Big Data. Pentaho can help you integrate and analyze Big Data in the biggest possible way. Other than this, users can also perform predictive analysis, ETL, and data mining and reporting. Pentaho also makes it easier to locate, combine and manage data from various sources like NoSQL and Hadoop.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, these 5 Business Intelligence tools are the leading ones in the market right now. So pick the one that best suits you needs and go all guns blazing!
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