Business Intelligence is nothing but converting raw data into useful business information. The raw data can come out from different sources and then this data is integrated with the help of ETL (Extract — Transform-Load) tools. After the process of integration, this data is loaded into a centralized Data warehouse (DW). We can then perform analysis on the data present in the DW and then this data is displayed via Dashboards/Reports.

The entire process of Business Intelligence is shown below :

Business Intelligence workflow

The main purpose of Business Intelligence is to aid in the better business decision making.

There are numerous Business Intelligence (BI) tools available in the market which can aid any organization to extract meaningful information from the data accumulated over time.

What features and capabilities a BI tool should have are highlighted below :

• BI Platform Type
• Supported Data Sources
• Standard Reporting
• Ad-Hoc Reporting
• Report Output and Scheduling
• Data Discovery and Visualization
• Access Control and Security
• Mobile Capabilities
• APIs / Embedding

Full-Stack BI Tools

Full-stack or traditional products are enterprise-level BI tools designed to solve the specific problem of enterprise data silos. Much crucial business data is stored in a range of different data stores, many attached to business applications like ERP. Full-stack BI tools consolidate all data in a data warehouse which is a relational database designed for data mining instead of transactional processing.

Slices of data from the warehouse — usually summary data for a single department like sales or finance — are stored in a “data mart” for quick access. All of this structured data is normalized by using an ETL process (Extract, Transform and Load) whereby transactional data is combined into a single pool of data and then “transformed” into a more appropriate format for querying and analysis before being written in the data warehouse database.

Data Discovery and Visualization Business Intelligence

Data Visualization products have a different purpose. These BI tools are primarily designed to help data analysts discover patterns in large quantities of data and to build compelling visual representations which allow these patterns to be easily understood.

These business intelligence tools often use a technology called in-memory analytics to query data residing on a computer’s RAM rather than on a physical disk. This means that the data does not have to be stored anywhere for subsequent analysis.

Data visualization products often have lower cost of implementation and require less support. This can make them good business intelligence tools for small companies that don’t need a full-stack business intelligence solution.

When considering different business intelligence tools, consider the following aspects of each product offering.

1. Ease of Use
2. Compatibility
3. Scalability

There are a wide variety of BI tools available in the market. Below is a list of the most popular ones :

TIBCO Spotfire

Tableau Desktop

Qlik Sense

SAP Crystal

TIBCO Jaspersoft

Tableau Server

SAP Lumira Discovery

Microsoft Power BI

Entrinsik Informer

QlikView

Microsoft Business Intelligence (MSBI)

Domo

Sisense

IBM Cognos

Looker

Zoho Analytics

Dundas BI

Alteryx Platform and many more …