Business Intelligence & Analysis Products

Business Intelligence & Analysis Products Scan & Evaluation


I. The 5  BI & analysis products that are going to be compared are the following:

       

1. Tableau

• Strength:
• supports an incredibly vast array of data sources, and does so very efficiently
• Tableau put a lot of effort into developing a robust mobile client.
• It is a relatively low cost solution
• integrates with most data types and offers out of the box integration with a variety of big data platforms
• Integrates with R (the data Statistic Language)

• Weaknesses:
• if you want to connect to a database, a developer skilled in SQL will have to create the SQL query to pull the dataset.
• There’s no way to recover previous versions- once you overwrite there’s no pulling back. (no versioning)

2. Qlik

• Strength:
• Qlikview is very User friendly which is easy to design, develop and deploy.
• It comes with various tools to build the meaningful dashboards and reports that will meet need of the organization.

• Weaknesses:
• deployment could become expensive

3. SAS

• Strength:
• It delivers reporting, analysis, and interpretation of business data that is crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly to meet market opportunity (Source)

• Weaknesses:

• SAS Business Intelligence Suite (Analytics Pro) - This includes the base SAS server, SAS/STAT and SAS/GRAPH $8000
• Additional Users - Cost per user $1710 (Source)
the size of data sets analyzed in SAS are generally bottlenecked by the size of the hard disk

4. SAP

• Strength:
• The product is scalable
• ad-hoc information

• Weaknesses:
• Is expensive

5.  Microsoft

• Strength:
• Cost is one of the main resson customers choose Microsoft
• Integrated with Excel
• With the new stand alone version of Power BI Allows connectivity to on-premises SQL server Analysis Service
• You can avoid moving or replicate data in the cloud while having a multidimensional data structure
• Is going to support Apple and android devices and Cloud deployment

• Weaknesses:
• Product portfolio is to wide, it can confuse customers 
• no drill-through capabilities in Power View
• It is difficult to find external help for implementation

 II.  The criteria that this Product will be evaluated is the following:

1. User Experience/ User Friendly
2. Internal Platform Integration 
3. Cloud Deployment
4. Support/ Documentation
5. Cost
6. Mobile

III. Evaluation of the products:

IV. Criteria Discussion:

1. User Experience

• using the definition of the Gartner's Quadrant I uses this Criteria as the following: "The ability to create highly interactive dashboards and content with visual exploration and embedded advanced and geospatial analytics to be consumed by others." (Source)

     2. Integration

• It is important to know how easy it is to integrate a product to the current tools uses in a company. For example a grand number of companies use SQL databases but a lot of BI product are very easy to use with excel sheet but it is a little more coplicated when it come to integrated with SQL. ( integrating it with SQL can avoid data replication)

     3.  Cloud Deployment

• It is important to use cloud resources if the local resources are not available in the company, buying local storage (servers) can become very expensive.

    4.  Documentation

• It Is important to be provided various tools and service to the users of this product so that they can feel comfortable  with their investment.

    5.  Mobile

• Mobile is a important criteria because it can take advantage of the characteristics of a native application in a mobile device and expands the access of the information.

     6. Cost

• It is a factor that has to be consider because it an investment for the company, not only the product's cost but the implementation costs.