Business Intelligence and Analysis Products Scan and Evaluation

Overview 

Companies across industries have been continuously gaining interest in using Business Intelligence to gather information for corporate analysis from collected raw data. Based on the market demand for sophisticated business intelligence tools and applications, there are numerous vendors that provide excellent BI (Business Intelligence) tools for corporate usage. 

Choosing a BI tool for the firm, one needs to take various criteria into account before making an investment. Factors such as the type of the company, size of the company, technical requirements and so forth must be individually considered to make a good decision. One more thing to keep in mind is the type of information one expects from the data and the tools. Due to the fact that there is a presence of several big competitors in the BI tools market, making such a choice can get difficult.

BI Industry Market Share 

Currently, there are many major players in the market such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, SAS Institute, Tibco Software, Tableau and so forth. Depending on the vendor, shown below is the market share of each major player as of the end of 2013. 

Source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2014/04/gartner-bi-analytics-market-shares-2013.html

Five BI Tools 

Taking into account all major players in the market, for the purpose of this article five products are being considered based on differences in certain criteria i.e. SAS BI, Oracle BI, Pentaho BI, Yellowfin BI, and Jaspersoft.

Comparison Criteria Used & Analysis 

While choosing a BI tool for corporate usage, there are several factors that need to be taken into account. Most of these factors depend on the type of firm and its employees for whom the application is of interest.  For academic purposes though, five measures are being taken into consideration that should act as primary filters while making such a choice. Following are the five measures along with their narratives that make up the primary filter: 

Productivity: This criterion defines how effective are the outcomes of the effort put in using a BI tool. 

Core Functionality: A BI tool these days comes with many offerings. This criterion is based on the breadth of these offerings.

Uniqueness: With a plethora of BI tools available in the market today, each vendor needs to be able distinguish their offerings from the competitor's. This criteria measures the tools based on their uniqueness of offerings. 

Cost: How cost effective the tool is. This basically compares the benefits versus the cost. 

Ease of Use: A firm needs to be able to get the most out of a tool with minimum input and training. Ease of use defines the ability of the tool to be used by employees without much hassle.

Comparison Table 

Based on the stated measures a comparison table is shown below that states the weightage that has been given to each criterion as well as the ratings of each BI tool for the same.

Yellowfin BI 

Using Yellowfin BI firms can report on and analyse collected data to generate useful insights about various business operations. The primary goal of Yellowfin BI is to make use of BI tools easy. 

Productivity: Yellowfin dashboards are vastly interactive with the ability to drill down through to meticulous information. Another notable feature that makes this tool so productive is its interactive filtering (include only certain products or regions for example). 

Core Functionality: Yellowfin offers more functionality within the platform other than the usual ones, such as connecting from data sources on the fly, drill anywhere within the data, and advanced calculations. It has over 50 data visualizations for users to choose from. 

Uniqueness: A unique feature about Yellowfin BI is that it focuses heavily on mobile and collaboration functionalities, providing users location intelligence for viewing and drilling data into maps to gain better context and make smarter business decisions. 

Ease of Use: The tool sports a storyboarding facility that allows users to combine reports with text and graphics to produce easily communicated visuals. Users are typically protected from the ugly technical details of data access, and a Meta data layer means that a user can access data in a format that is friendly and more useful. 

Cost: Yellowfin offers a single all-inclusive per user per annum subscription-licensing model – software, maintenance, support and upgrades are included. There are no catches or add-on licenses to contend with. Yellowfin offers a 5-user license starter pack coming in at $3,000 per annum.

Pentaho BI 

Pentaho is broad enough to meet most needs, and is best summarized as a ‘good all-rounder’ – something that will be attractive to business managers who simply want to get a job done. Along with the broad array of analytics tools that address BI, Pentaho also provides predictive analytics and data integration. 

Core Functionality: Pentaho offers powerful visualizations that allow users to interact with their data, zooming in and looking at important statistics. A more noteworthy feature is its data integration software, which can blend information together from unlimited sources, including NoSQL, Hadoop, relational databases, and analytical databases. 

Uniqueness: Pentaho has many unique abilities such as powerful visualizations, geo-mapping, heat grids, and scatter charts. This helps cater to specific customer requirements at times when other tools seem to be of little use. 

Productivity: The Pentaho system relies on in-memory data caching, which provides analysis of data as fast as one can think, making for a vastly quicker BI tool. This tool can also cater to the organizations that don't have fancy reporting requirements with web-based reporting. 

Ease of Use: It is very easy to build an ETL pipeline after the initial learning curve. The reporting solutions along with visual analysis and dash-boarding tools are considerably easy to use. 

Cost: In the world of open source Business Intelligence tools, it is the frontrunner. This open source lineage means that there is a free community edition available for use (no support and training). This also makes the solution cost-effective.

SAS BI 

It is a package of various technologies and solutions that address features such as statistics, business intelligence, data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning, and a number of vertical and horizontal business solutions. 

Core Functionality: BI offering comes with all the usual features, with added bonus of a broader analytical capability. Data visualization, reporting, ad-hoc reporting, self-service BI, collaboration and mobile BI are all available and compare well with others.

Productivity: On the other hand SAS is not likely to be the most productive analytics environment. It is complex and this of course is the shadow cast by the sophistication it offers. 

Uniqueness: Visual Analytics in SAS includes features that are unique in the BI world, including its integration of powerful, advanced analytics directly into a BI tool. 

Ease of Use: The learning curve and breadth of knowledge is very large. It takes a while for a user to become proficient with SAS and the training tools. 

Cost: Keeping the above points in mind of the tool being complex and having a significant learning curve, it is best suited for large firms. But for the price it’s the best there is.

Jaspersoft 

Jaspersoft is a solid, widely used product set, that delivers a no frills BI environment and will meet the needs of most organizations with ease. All the usual functionality is included – reporting, dashboards, analysis and data integration. 

Core Functionality: Dashboards, visualizations, rich analytics including a web-scale platform, and self-service reports are just a few of the capabilities supported by Jaspersoft, which can be easily embedded in both internal and commercial applications. 

Productivity: This system includes a report scheduler that allows users to manage distribution of reports across a company. In-memory analysis capabilities support the system's ability to process complex analytical queries quickly. 

Uniqueness: One of Jaspersoft's most notable features if not so unique is its reporting ability. Their reporting tools draw data from multiple places and display it in a simple, straightforward, interactive way for users to analyze and draw insights from. 

Ease of Use: A variety of services make the environment fairly easy to use, once they have been set up they look after security, metadata and scheduling activities. 

Cost: Over all it provides a reasonably priced, effective environment to develop and deploy BI applications. It does what it needs to do without a great deal of fuss.

Oracle BI

For existing Oracle customers this tool will be of greatest interest due to its fairly expensive and proprietary nature. For such customers, the functionality and architecture presented by Oracle can be enormously beneficial. 

Core Functionality: The Oracle BI Foundation Suite encompasses reporting, dashboards, ad-hoc analysis, multi-dimensional OLAP, scorecards and predictive analytics in one integrated platform. The data visualization capabilities compare well with other products and include recommended visualization for specific data. 

Productivity: For the firms who follow the Oracle mantra, OBIEE can do wonders. The BI Foundation Suite merges all of Oracle’s eight BI platforms. Out of which one of the benefits of Oracle's Exalytics component is that it can analyze large sets of data in a short time. 

Uniqueness: Along with superb integration of Oracle services, the BI Suite is one of the few on the market that provides excellent Big Data capability. 

Ease of Use: Oracle operates under a very dated architecture. This means the interface is not very smooth and complex features not very well handled. Companies seeking to customize the software or to make upgrades will need to make a substantial investment of both time and capital. 

Cost: For big time Oracle customers OBIEE provides considerably lower costs and more functionality. For others it would be significant investment of both time and money as stated above.

Best from the Rest 

Based on the above multi-criteria analysis, it can be said that Yellowfin BI turns out to be the best overall BI tool. But, every firm has specific requirements and based on that the factors also differ significantly. Hence, the choice of a tool really depends on the business model as well as project requirements that the firm is engaged with.