Business intelligence (BI) refers to a set of technologies and strategies for evaluating business information and transforming it into actionable insights. These insights lead to strategic business decisions.
Business intelligence software (also called BI software) is a tool intended to analyse business data to understand an organisation’s positive and negative aspects effectively. Alternatively, these tools accept business data and present them in user-friendly views like dashboards, reports, graphs, and charts. Hence, the users obtain an in-depth acumen about the state of the business and its performance. Moreover, these tools facilitate business users to access various types of data, including current, historical, in-house, third-party, unstructured, and semi-structured data.
As the global business intelligence software market is set to reach USD 34.16bn by 2028, the significance of BI tools and software is evident across organisations, leveraging it to overcome diverse challenges faced across business domains.
Why Use Business Intelligence Software?
Here are all the reasons why business intelligence software are being utilised by organisations.
- Facilitates data-driven decision-making
- Evaluate the company’s performance
- Determine actionable insights
- Provides real-time data availability
- Enhanced business operations visibility
- Provides industry-specific use cases and benefits
Let’s explore the details of the top 8 business intelligence software that streamline your business decision process.
1) Microsoft Power BI
This BI software helps organisations to manipulate, access, and analyse massive amounts of data to understand the working mechanism profoundly. Consequently, it leads to more cognizant business decisions.
It is renowned for its wide assortment of features like data visualisation, dashboards, reporting, collaboration data modelling, and smooth integration with all relevant Microsoft products. Its data modelling functionality lets users build relationships between various data sources and accomplish precise calculations.
2) Pipedrive
This BI tool helps organisations make the most of their sales efforts. It helps them track progress, set their sales pipelines, optimise, and develop cutting-edge sales business intelligence reports. It lets you customise workflows and data fields per your evolving business processes.
Its built-in tools facilitate the booking, scheduling and managing of appointments with the sales team. Consequently, those tools help start-ups to make a powerful first impression.
Pipedrive perfectly integrates with Mailchimp, Asana, Trello, and Slack. It offers instant alerts through email. Moreover, you can formulate strategies and restore broken processes with granular reports.
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3) QlikSense
If your organisation aims to gain the maximum advantage of its stored data, it must use QlikSense. It does so by analysing data and the organisation’s performance and proposing improvements.
Its associative data model helps users connect and discover data relationships from various sources. Subsequently, it easily obtains data insights. The non-technical users can use its drag-and-drop functionality to prepare and customise their dashboards and reports independently. Some of the advanced features of QlikSense are ETL capability, model building (data management), and predictive analysis.
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4) Zoho Analytics
This BI software lets users quickly analyse data and build intuitive dashboards. Its AI-driven assistant provides insightful reports to solve users’ queries. Some of its outstanding aspects include real-time monitoring, data analytics, embedded analytics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), customised reports, and a drag-and-drop interface.
Its integrated business analytics help you to analyse data from different business apps. NLP, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technologies significantly improve its analytics efficiency. Furthermore, you can access its various visualisation options, i.e., pivot tables, charts, KPI widgets, summary views, and custom-themed dashboards.
You get prompt alerts through Slack, Email, and Microsoft Teams channels. Moreover, it offers customer support through phone, chat, and email.
5) Tableau
If you are looking for easy-to-use BI software, you can use Tableau. With just a few clicks, you can analyse data ingested from various data sources. Consequently, you can discern patterns and profoundly infer their data.
It is one of the reliable open source BI tools as it economically uses data and facilitates better business outcomes with visual analytics, data storytelling, and fully-integrated data management.
Its drag-and-drop interface helps you easily prepare insightful data visualisation reports. Consequently, you can easily share reports with your clients or colleagues.
Some of its exceptional aspects are multiple data sources, customisation and collaboration, the ability to cluster data relationships, intuitive dashboards, and accurate calculations.
6) Oracle Analytics Cloud
A superior level of technical know-how is not required to use this tool. It is an easy-to-use, customisable tool that helps you to analyse datasets to gain insights and make informed business decisions exhaustively. Its all-inclusive set of tools helps you to deduce and share data insights.
It addresses all aspects of the analytics and reporting process, including data planning, modelling, visualisation, and collaboration. The tool keeps you connected with the automatic delivery of analytics and supervises business performance anywhere, anytime.
Some of the admirable aspects of this tool are flexible data storage, a broad assortment of data sources, real-time collaboration and reporting, and the use of artificial intelligence in data analysis.
7) NetSuite
Quickly analyse your organisation’s performance across all business domains using NetSuite. This easy-to-use tool assists you in learning trends and insights to enhance your business. Moreover, it offers data analytics and real-time reports.
Its embedded analytics help organisations conduct actionable analyses to streamline their overall business operations. It backs all decisions with timely and precise information.
You can embed NetSuite into DevOps CI/CD flows and DataOps processes. The included algorithms, test behaviour, and algorithms are fully customisable. You can access various connectors related to APIs, RDBMS, SaaS, Flatfiles, and business applications.
It offers customer support through Contact Form and Chat. You can explore multiple ready-to-use validation templates.
8) Dundas BI
In terms of flexibility and availability of built-in tools, Dundas BI is one of the best open source BI tools. Its all-inclusive platform supports data visualisation, advanced analytics, and governance capabilities. With access to geographic maps, basic charts, gauges, and heat maps, you can access various functionalities related to reporting and visualisation.
It lets you seamlessly collaborate with your clients, partners, and team members. Its seamless collaboration abilities help you to effortlessly share reports in just a few clicks. Moreover, Dundas BI is renowned for including various data connections that help you to achieve complex analytics.
It helps you to develop and analyse intuitive dashboards, scorecards, reports, and more. You can deploy the tool as the principal data portal for the organisation or embed it into a prevailing website as a custom BI platform.
You can use it on Linux and Windows. It flawlessly integrates with FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Freshdesk, Slack, Zendesk, Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. The supported compliance standards are GDPR and CCPA. You get immediate alerts through Pager and Email.
Other features include plenty of chart options, various sources and connectors, data visualisation through maps, an intuitive interface, and decent customer support.
Takeaway
All the business intelligence tools own their loyal user base and a verified track record of offering solutions for data analysis. Defining your organisational goal in the context of data analysis helps you easily choose the most suitable business intelligence software. Before choosing the one for your organisation, ensure the employees have the relevant knowledge and skills to utilise the most of the tool.
Using business intelligence software is a wise decision to streamline your business operations. Also, standing out as a specialist in the business administration domain with a Dr. title is an outstanding achievement in itself.
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