Shopping For Business Intelligence

January 5, 2014

There is not an Amazon equivalent for organizations in the market for business intelligence tools. They must rely on conducting their own research to find the best tool to suit their needs. Why has not one of the world’s IT experts taken the time to aggregate all BI reviews, software specifications, and other relevant information into one source? Oh, wait, someone did! Software Advice is a Web site where people can read about business intelligence software and select the proper tool for their organization. In the article, “Compare Business Intelligence (BI) Software Tools” there is a rundown of the top ten most recommended business intelligent systems along with an explanation about how there is a growing need for BI software to analyze data and give a user friendly interface.

There are three main ways BI software is used: data management, data discovery, and reporting tools. What and how the organization wants to use the data shapes the type of the software they need to buy. Another consideration is to figure out what type of buyer you are:

“Business users and departmental buyers. This group of buyers favors small data discovery vendors and BI tools over the big traditional BI systems. Ease-of-use and fast deployment are more important than in-depth functionality and integration. They are usually business users rather than IT staff.

IT buyers. Traditional buyers are more focused on functionality and integration within their information infrastructure stacks or other enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Integration across different entities and departments is usually more important than ease of use.”

Then there are the current marketing trends. These shift from year to year, but the ones on people’s radar are: mobile BI applications, SaaS, business users outnumbering IT staff, big data, and in-memory processing.

Software Advice offers consultation services to organizations in the market for a BI solution. As of writing this article, they have helped 159,561 companies in eight years. The initial consult is free as is the general information, but there are going to be fees somewhere. Software Advice selling technique is analogous to a personal shopper.

Whitney Grace, January 05, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business intelligence, News, Tools

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.