The Importance of Business Intelligence for Business

With the advent of innovative technologies like SaaS solutions, business intelligence (BI) software is getting way more affordable for small and medium-sized businesses to help them process enormous amounts of data.

Nowadays, business intelligence tools and techniques are basically a set of the most effective infrastructures, software, tools, and practices, primarily designed to:

• enhance operational performance; 
• reduce the time and costs needed for data gathering, processing and analyzing;
• optimize and assist in making key decisions.

Business analytics tools are a must-have precondition to meet all the specific requirements and overcome any issues, arising from data processing and analyzing. It’s no wonder that the global business intelligence market is expected to expand from $15.64 billion in 2016 to $29.48 billion by 2022, with a CAGR of 11.1%.

Medium and enterprise-scale companies are most interested in applying to the business intelligence platforms as they work with truly huge database volumes. Here are some major benefits of utilizing such technology, just to name a few:

• Business intelligence cases are of indispensable help when it comes to examining the market and your customers/partners/competitors’ behavior and needs. Based on the received information, you can improve the quality of your products or develop a new strategy to meet market needs. It can also aid you in identifying how your customers interact with your business and improve the provider-customer relationship, thus increasing sales;
• Business intelligence platforms provide great visibility of your entire business structure, allowing you to enhance specific components if needed. BI makes the whole data processing much easier and more efficient, allowing to make insightful reports and concentrate on business running, instead of data analyzing;
• Business intelligence tools pull the raw data from the different sources and parts of your business together and turn it to the usable visualized form. Such valuable insights in the form of reports, charts or eye-pleasing infographics are very clear and informative. It comes in handy for any experts to modify operational strategy and see connections between different assets and functions of your business;
• With the help of business intelligence technology, you can scan the manufacturing procedures efficiency and staff performance. As well as you are able to determine where to allocate your resources, according to the actual requirements and goals.

That’s why the entire business intelligence software usability and reliability have reached an all-time record level, according to Forbes.

Review of Top 5 Business Intelligence Tools

There are a lot of such solutions nowadays any business can apply to, including free business intelligence tools. But here are 5 of the best business intelligence examples

1. Microsoft Power BI

Price: $9,99 per month for one user; 60-day free trial plan

Documentation:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/

Microsoft Power BI is one of the best complex BI software with a customizable intuitive interface, consisting of different services, apps and tools, providing robust, interactive insights. It offers both cloud and on-premise solutions with the downloadable software and the possibility to gather data from IoT devices, and designed to be used by business analysts. Microsoft Power BI can be integrated with the Microsoft office tools and is a great add-on to be used along with Azure. However, some lags occur on huge data sets.

2. Zoho Analytics

Price: From €25 for a basic plan to €495 for enterprise plan per month; 15-day free trial

Documentation: https://www.zoho.com/analytics/help/

Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI platform with the decent intuitive user interface, allowing you to effectively process and analyze the data, as well as create in-depth reports and infographics. The data can be gathered and integrated from various sources, such as Microsoft Office documents, DropBox, Google Drive or Zoho own tools. Zoho Analytics is an easy-to-use SaaS solution with comfy online service, where you can create eye-pleasing reports via drag and drop actions. Your reports can then be sent to your e-mail or you can access them on the website.

3. Tableau Desktop

Price: $70 per user per month billed annually; 14-day free trial

Documentation: https://www.tableau.com/support/knowledgebase

Tableau Desktop is one of the leading and most popular BI platforms for any business size. Having an intuitive interface, it allows you to analyze the mixed data from various sources and provides an easy-to-use reporting system and full API features. This BI platform specializes in enhanced data visualization, using drag and drop functionality and VizQL query language. It has over 150 built-in functions in order to make comprehensive calculations and data analyzes. Coming along with reliable security level, Tableau business intelligence software offers great analyzes shareability and compatibility with mobile applications.

4. Looker

Price: From $3000 to $5000 per month for 10 users

Documentation: https://docs.looker.com/

Looker is another web-based self-service BI platform for gathering, processing, analyzing, visualizing and sharing large volumes of data insights. This tool was designed for enterprises with a big budget and unlike most BI tools, Looker updates dashboards consistently, so you can acquire the relevant data in real-time. Users can drill down into the info for gathering more insightful business understanding and thus more efficiently enhance the operational strategy. By using this innovative technology, you come up with easy-to-use interface and good-looking reports.

5. Sisense

Price: Available upon request

Documentation: https://documentation.sisense.com/#gsc.tab=0

Sisense is a relatively new business intelligence and analytics software which offers robust drag-and-drop based solutions for organizations, working with huge databases. Powered by the unique in-chip (in-memory) architecture, Sisense is able to improve and boost all the stages of the data tasks, such as gathering, analyzing and visualizing and crunch large datasets in seconds. This innovative technology allows even non-technical experts to effectively work with the databases of any size and out of any source. Users may also conduct ad-hoc queries and receive promptly relevant answers.

With all that said, if you decide to use and apply such technologies, ByteAnt is always ready to offer you competitive solutions with an eye to Business Intelligence Platforms development or provide an individual consultation regarding any other software development issues of your interest. Feel free to contact us anytime.