What is the Cost of the Question? What is the Question?

TCO or Total Cost of Ownership of answering questions is elusive yet cannot be ignored. When the cost of the question is too high it remains to be asked in the first place. This limits the ability to lead and results in opportunity loss. What if existing technology correctly aligned could close the gaps? New technology must be considered but only after existing systems and processes are optimal. Otherwise any new effort will inherit the dysfunction.

Software and services quickly become major line items of “cost” as organizations implement and later align their new technologies by replacing old processes and integrating with existing. At this stage there’s nothing but cost, cost in implementing but also the loss of productivity as legacy systems and processes are interrupted.

At TG we pride ourselves of being technology neutral yet ROI bound and solution centric

When assessing business transformation we look very seriously at all the tools used within your toolbox and how best to leverage existing functionality. The Decision Science ecology has amazing open source tools that can literally be configured and best minimize technology overlap and overall cost.

Below are some of the markets stand-alone for profit BI technologies that augment or replace existing. TG works with all of them at an expert level and leverages all that is good and functional within your transformation efforts. We understand where emerging technologies should be applied and how to best time their involvement within your journey to optimization.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a compact package, including data mining, business analytics, data visualization, data tools, and other cognitive business practices to accelerate data-driven decisions. In the layman terminology, when you have a comprehensive view of your business data and know-how to use data to eradicate business shortcomings and adapt frequently evolving market situations, it is referred to as intelligence of the business.

Business intelligence for small business facilities, a kinetic self-analysis service revolves around the governed data to empower business users and provide insightful information. BI is a safety umbrella for a business organization to cover specific methods of collecting, storing, and analyzing data-driven from multiple business operations. Overall, business intelligence solutions are comprised of all the progressive forces, which come together to help businesses formulate “actionable decisions” including –

• Data Mining – Uncovering dataset trends using statistics and machine learning.
• Reporting – Commuting data among stakeholders so that they can make conclusive decisions.
• Descriptive Analytics – Taking preliminary data analysis a base to figure out what happened.
• Data Visualization – Presentation of data analysis in visual formats such as graphs, charts, etc.
• Data Compilation – Gathering data from various resources, recognizing data dimensions and measurements to prepare a comprehensive data analysis report.

Top Business Intelligence Solution of 2020

The business intelligence and analytics industry have been booming right now because of the business entities’ competitive, customer-centric, and hyper-productivity approach. Thus, various data technology solutions have been developed by some leading companies, and the top BI solutions of 2020 include the following:

1. Power BI

Power BI is a solution for self and enterprise business intelligence presented by Microsoft. It is a cloud-based business intelligence solution that shares interactive visual data across global data centers to meet all the compliance and regulatory needs of businesses.

Pros

• It is an economical solution with the Power BI for free and Power BI Pro for a very small monthly user price.
• Weekly or monthly updates are ignited by Microsoft to increase the capabilities of Power BI.
• Satisfy the requirements of both the self and enterprise data analytics through powerful semantic models.
• It can smoothly analyze large volumes of data.
• Leverage from Microsoft AI has taken to prepare data and find insights quickly.

Cons

• Power BI isn’t a good option to handle complex relationships between multiple tables with more than one link.
• Limited visual configuration options are available to present data.
• The user interface of Power BI is overcrowded and bulky.
• The expression language of Power BI is DAX, which is not an easy language to work with.

2. Sisense

In 2010, Sisense was introduced as a BI analytics tool with $4 million Series A funding. This tool has been growing rapidly and burning a lot of cash to create an innovative BI environment. It has been named as the Visionary Quadrant by the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platforms for the past two years.

Pros

• It offers web-based as well as private cloud-based solutions.
• Sisense can easily coordinate with large volumes of columnar datasets.
• It allows users to take snapshots of their online data to comply with life cycle analysis.
• The dashboard of Sisense is well-curated with a variety of widgets, charts, KPI, and informative views.

Cons

• Sisense’sElasticube™ is complicated for an average user with a basic technical background.
• It is a bulky application that can consume a lot of space.
• Sisense dashboard works perfectly for the real-time web users only.
• Price hasn’t been disclosed on the Sisense website, so you won’t know the software price unless you contact them.

3. Tableau Software

Tableau Software received the Gartner rating and has been used by healthcare, insurance, education, and other business domains to present its data visually. Its features aren’t limited to the graphical presentation as a heap of other features are also available. The software requests the cloud, spreadsheets, OLAP cubes, and other categories to generate a comprehensive analytical report.

Pros

• The visual representation qualities of Tableau Software are highly superior.
• Easy to use the functionality of the software lets non-dev users completely utilize all the application’s functionalities.
• Robust and reliable performance, even on big data, makes it a high performing tool.
• Tableau Software has established a relationship with multiple data sources such as SAP, DB Technologies, and HADOOP.
• It is a mobile-friendly solution for both Android and iOS devices.

Cons

• It is a quite expensive business intelligence and analytics solution.
• After-sales support of the software provider isn’t satisfactory.
• Visual exploitation of confidential data has caused the issue of security enhancement.
• Significant involvement from an IT department to configure and expansion of Tableau Software functions.

 4. Qlik

Qlik is an enterprise BI solution with the open-ended, data-driven, and skill level based features. It has a global community of more than 50,000 users and has been named a Leader in Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI by Gartner for 10th year in a row.

Pros

• Qlik is capable of providing a dynamic BI ecosystem to its users.
• The visual dashboard enables users to effectively interpret and analyze their data.
• Multiple remote teams can collaborate together to make data-driven decisions by social analysis and real time sharing.
• It is a self-service tool that ensures that users can independently use Qlik without consulting the IT department for every operation.
• It is low maintenance software that doesn’t require much technical supervision.

Cons

• Insufficient tool for real-time data analysis.
• It can load heavy data; unfortunately, computer’s RAM sets to limit.
• Development and scriptwriting with Qlik require an intensive training of SQL.
• Integrating Qlik with other software is slightly dicey as it comes with a distinct appearance.

Comparison Between Top Business Intelligence Solution

Getting business intelligence for small businesses is a very intellectual process as they have limited resources and want to channelize them to improve the efficiency of business properly. Thus, it is pivotal for businesses to draw a comparison between all the leading business intelligence solutions.

• Power BI
  

  Integration

  It can integrate with SharePoint, Azure power flow, power apps, 365 Excel and several other Microsoft products.

  Learning Curve

  Slightly Difficult

  Performance

  Can’t handle complicated data.

  Data Sources

  SQL, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, etc.

  Visualization

  Average

  Price

  Power BI Pro start at $9.99 per user per month with 60 days free trial.

• Sisense
  

  It is integrated with cloud.

  Slightly Difficult

  Can handle complicated data, but bulky software.

  Azure Data Explorer, ClickHouse, Denodo, Dremio, IBM DB2, etc.

  Great

  Not disclosed.

• Tableau Software
  

  It can integrate with Microsoft and other third-party platforms.

  Difficult

  Can handle complicated data.

  JSON, PDF, real statistical reports, Microsoft documents, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle Redshift, etc.

  Great

  Tableau Creator subscription costs $70 per user per month, and Tableau Explorer costs $35 per user per month. 14 days free trial.

• Qlik
  

  Not appropriate for integration.

  Difficult

  Can handle complicated data, but bulky software.

  Amazon Redshift, Apache Drill (Beta), Apache Hive, Apache Phoenix (Beta), Apache Spark (Beta), Azure SQL, Cloudera Impala, etc.

  Great

  Qlik cost $15 per month.

Future of Business Intelligence

The future of business intelligence is to organize data from various data silos and develop a usable ecosystem to validate the origin of data. With the contribution of data experts, the future of business intelligence is going to revolve around the quality of data, self-service, accessible tools, a wave of visualization, prominent presence of AI, and so much more. Overall, upcoming days for business intelligence are beaming with new technologies and innovation, which is ultimately good news for businesses.