Comparison of Business Intelligence and Analysis Tools

Organizations today suffer from the DRIP syndrome. DRIP stands for 
Data Rich Information Poor. There is too much of data coming in from various different sources but there is no central system to extract some useful information from the data. This is where Business Intelligence comes in, to make sense of all this data.

There are quite a few commercial vendors offering Business Intelligence and Analysis products. This article deals with comparing a few vendors based on a weighted criterion. First, let's talk about the criteria.

For the weighted decision matrix, I will be using the following criteria:

Data Sourcing: The first step of analysis using a BI tool is getting the data. Data can be from text files, flat files, CSVs, databases, servers, etc. The more sources a tool supports, the more are the opportunities for getting data. Also, it should be easy for an end-user to connect the data sources to the BI tool.

Usability: No matter how good a tool is at its core functions if it's not easy to use it will most probably be rejected by the end user. A tool should be user-friendly, the UI should not be too complex and the end user should not be lost while trying to figure how to go about using the tool.

Filtering and Visualization: The end user should be able to drill down to the data they are seeking. This can be done using filters, selecting criteria, the intelligence of the software (maybe?), etc. Another function associated with selecting data is visualization. A picture is worth a thousand words and certainly more than 10,000 rows on a spreadsheet! If a tool allows the user to see data in terms of graphs or charts and then allow drilling down, that tool is intuitive.

Reporting: The tool should allow the creation of reports. A BI tool would be marginally useful if it cannot be used to share information. Reports should be customizable based on user selected criteria and the tool should allow exporting reports in different formats. Also, integration with most popular extensions e.g. Words, Excel, PDF, etc. would be a plus.

Cost: Cost is one of the first factors which is looked at while selecting a business tool, especially by the finance division. The cost, of course, is relative. A big brand license would be too expensive to a small scale customer and vice versa. But a lot of cost-to-features can be done while determining the selection of a BI tool.

Added Features - These features are not the core features of a BI tool but have gone from could have to should have or even must-have. Following are the add-on features:

Admin & Management: BI tools are not stand-alone tools anymore. They are full-fledged applications. Thus, these applications should allow administration of users, access rights, security, etc.

Deployment: BI tools should make it easy for users to implement them in their own system. It should be easy for end users to integrate the tool with their current existing systems.

Mobility: A cell phone today is more powerful than the computers on the Apollo 11's mission. And with users being more mobile than ever, BI tools are expected to seamlessly integrate users on mobile devices and offer the same or almost the same experience as a desktop user.

This article will be comparing the following commercial vendors:

• IBM Cognos

• Microstrategy

• Tableau

• SAS

• Microsoft

A weighted scoring matrix criterion of features of all the popular BI tools yields the following result:

From the above matrix, we can see that Tableau scores high on Usability, while SAS scores high on Filtering & Visualisation. Microstrategy scores high on Mobility and Deployment and Reporting. Microsoft scores on Administration while SAS and Tableau tie on Data Sourcing. Overall, Microstrategy ranks ahead because of its higher ranking of features.

Sources:

https://www.gartner.com/doc/2989518/magic-quadrant-business-intelligence-analytics

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2491954,00.asp

http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/analystreport/ovum-decision-matrix-bi-105875.pdf

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-evaluate-and-select-the-right-BI-analytics-tool