Darshil BI MIS587: What makes a good Business Intelligence Tool?

Talking about the current state of technology today, the term “Business Intelligence” has become a popular buzzword. Just look at the amount of data generated by companies today. Today we don’t talk about megabytes or even gigabytes of data. You will see hard-disks that can house terabytes of data in the hands of almost anyone who has a portable hard-drive. Yes, I am talking about people, people like you and me. Just think of the times of the year 2000, we could only think about such storage capacities only for firms. What changed in last 10-15 years? The main reason is that the hard-disks got cheaper and the disk makers were able to pack in more gigabytes of storage in a smaller box at low cost. What does this imply for companies who used to store much more than what retail consumers do today?

“Higher Complexity in data analysis and huge amount data to simplify”

Hail the return of Business Intelligence (BI)...

According to Wikipedia,

“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”

The BI tools and technologies have the ability to work on huge amounts of data and analyze the data to give meaningful insights, insights that could be used to achieve strategic business goals. BI tools have also been known to provide competitive advantage. For example, if you are a retail company and based on the purchase information of products, you could identify which products sell the most and when do customers flock to buy a certain product. If you are the only one doing it, you get the benefits of low inventory, better managed products and huge cost benefits. Interesting, don’t you think?

In this post, I am going to analyze 5 well-known BI tools based on 5 criteria and then come to a conclusion as to which tool is the best based on the chosen criteria.

First, let me talk about the criteria.

Criteria:

Reporting This feature refers to the capability of the tool to create static and interactive reports representing summarized data in the data warehouse. Interactive reports allow users to dynamically create new reports based on user-input. This is the most important capability that is expected out of any BI tool. Apart from being interactive, reports are expected to have drill down and group outcome for a given data-set.

· Ad-hoc queries

This feature allows users to create their own queries and create their own reports by using their ad-hoc queries. The key to this capability is having an added layer that hides the complexity of underlying data sources and allowing the user to create new queries in simple language terms instead of a query language like SQL. Because Ad-hoc queries are created and used by users on-the-fly, there might be performance issues while executing the query. Hence dynamic query optimization

· Interactive Visualization

This feature allows data to be displayed in visual format using pictures and charts). It is a very well-known fact that a picture represents far more information than words. Also, users usually prefer pictures and charts in the output rather than facts represented in tabular format. Previously, BI tools had graphical ways to show output. But, today’s BI tools are capable of creating graphical output on the fly, including the output for dynamic queries or the cases where the user wishes to drill down or summarize the output of an existing report.

· Cost

It refers to how much would it cost to purchase the BI tool. For certain tools, individual features might have their own costs. We need to consider the costs (the tool cost + cost of extra features) when deciding on the tool. Although a user usually wants to have all the features of a product/tool, it might not be always feasible for the organization to buy a full-fledged version. Also, we need to consider the costs of licensing and training/retraining users for the tool. There is always a trade-off between cost and the value derived from the tool.

· Ease of Use

The people who create the tool and the people who end-up using the tool are very different from each other. Their technical capabilities are very different. Any BI tool should be made from the point of view of the end-user. The end-user is not expected to have the expertise of the tool developers and expect the tool to be fairly simple to learn and use.

Now that we have an idea of the parameters used to evaluate the tools, let us start talking about the tools:

Tools

Oracle BI

Oracle has multiple tools in the BI space. Companies can buy the tool that would best suit their needs. For large enterprises, oracle provides ‘Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite’ and for small/medium enterprises, oracle provides ‘Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition One‘. For our discussion, we will be considering Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite. It includes capabilities like Enterprise BI, mobile BI, OLAP analytics, Enterprise Reporting and Scorecard & Strategy Management

Pros

Integrated dashboards
Strong administrative capabilities

Cons:

Unintuitive tasks and interface (not user friendly)
Lags pure-play vendors on innovation front (like mobile BI)

Cost: The cost varies based on how many features do you need, the number of end-users and the kind of support you require from Oracle. The base price is about $300,000 (without additional features and additional users).

Microstrategy

Microstrategy is a company dedicated to providing Business Intelligence and mobile solutions. It is primarily into enterprise BI market. Their tools (like Microstrategy analytics) use data from variety of sources (data warehouse is just one of them) to create reports as well as provide analysis on the data.

Pros:

The benchmark in large BI deployments for enterprises
They offer the most required features to customers

Cons:

· Not easy to use

· Not easily integrated with other databases and systems

Cost:
Costs about $600,000 per CPU core in the server
Costs about $300,000 per CPU core for web-based use

Tableau

Tableau is a company that focusses on products purely on data visualization in business intelligence.

Pros:

· Interactive & leading edge data discovery

· Top notch visualization capabilities

· Easy to use

· Easy to import data from different sources

Cons:

· Lacks standard capabilities like production reporting and metadata management

· Not considered industry standard

· Not easily scalable when the dataset size increases

Cost:

Desktop License: $999 - $1999 (depending on personal/professional license)
Online: $500 per year

SAP Business Objects

SAP Business Objects is the part of SAP that offers BI tools to enterprise users. It is a suite of front-end applications that allow users to make use of the BI capabilities like view, sort and analyze data (reports, dashboards, Explorer).

Pros:

· Easily integrates with SAP

· Data stored in flexible structure. So easy to scale

· Easy to deploy

· Data retrieval and maintenance is fast and simple

Cons:

· Integration is tough as there are multiple applications for specific purpose

· Different environments required by specific applications, making it tedious

Cost:

There are separate products for individual components. So cost varies based on the components bought

SAS

SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite that provides functionalities of business intelligence, data management and predictive analytics. It is the market leader in the advanced analytics space.

Pros:

· SAS can handle any data set or data type. SAS excels at data management

· Industry and domain specific analytics applications

· Industry standard for statistical analysis

Cons:

· It takes time to get used to SAS features. Difficult for business users

· Special skills needed to change algorithms for SAS

· High cost

Cost:
Single user license could go over $100,000 per year

	Tools	Oracle BI	Microstrategy	Tableau	SAP BO	SAS
Criteria	Weight
Reporting	25%	7	8	9	8	7
Ad-hoc Queries	20%	7	7	8	8	9
Interactive Visualization	10%	6	8	10	7	5
Cost	30%	6	6	7	5	2
Ease of Use	25%	4	3	10	7	4
Points	100%	6.55	6.75	9.45	7.55	5.65
Rank		4	3	1	2	5