Analysis of Business Intelligence tools

MIS 587- Blog 1

In this post, I will start with introducing some Business Intelligence tools chosen for this comparative study.

1.OBIEE

OBIEE comes from a very well established and widely trusted vendor, Oracle. The latest version i.e. 11g is built on a robust technological foundation that supports the highest workloads and most complex deployments.

Strengths

·       Advanced enterprise capabilities that can be leveraged to create & manage tons of dashboards.

·       Ad-hoc reports can be created through the web interface.

·       Strong enterprise level security and user management.

Drawbacks

·       A lot of effort required to create even basic visualizations.

·       Deployment is difficult.

Figure 1. OBIEE Screen capture

2. MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy is a pretty popular BI & Analytics tool that allows even non-technical users to create powerful and insightful dashboards. It is available on a variety of platforms like web and mobile devices.

Strengths
·       Highly and easily customizable dashboards.
·        Ability to download big data during off-performance hours.

·         A very user-friendly interface.

Drawbacks

·       A steep learning curve.

·       It operates within rigid data structures implying a considerable amount of time needs to be given for ETL.

·       Lack of predictive analytical tools.

Figure 2. Dashboard created in MicroStrategy

3. IBM Cognos

Cognos is an online based business intelligence platform. It is comprised of around 30 products. One thing that is unique to Cognos is that it can serve large corporate giants & smaller to midsize companies on the same system.

Strengths

Attention to customer feedback in the design of it’s products makes Cognos a highly desirable BI tool.

Cognos 10 is bale to meld together information from multiple platforms, allowing for different systems to run together seamlessly.
A good amount of internal and external security.
Drawbacks
New users find it difficult to decipher error messages.
Data reports take time to compile.
Support services are not that good.

Figure 3. Dashboard created using IBM Cognos

Qlikview

The unique feature of Qlikview is its unique inference engine that maintains data associations automatically. This means it is less query dependant. It is comprised of three main components. Qlikview Desktop, Qlikview Publisher, Qlikview Server.

Strengths

·       A simplified google-like search feature which makes it very easy for the user to gain quick    insights into data.

·       Performance is very high.

·       A huge user community providing quick answers.

Drawbacks

·       Self-servicing for end users is quite difficult.

·       Debugging is difficult.

Figure 4.  Dashboard created using Qlikview

Birst
Birst provides an integrated Business Intelligence platform designed for both cloud delivery and on premise deployment as a software application. It comes in two editions. the Dicovery edition and the Enterprise edition.
Strengths
Provides Data warehousing and ETL capabilities.
No need to install anything on desktop.
Drawbacks
Limited reporting capability.
Support services are poor.

Figure 5. Dashboard created using Birst

Weighted Analysis

Criteria	Weight	OBIEE	MicroStrategy	IBM Cognos	Qlikview	Birst
Ease of use	30%	8	6	6	10	7
Integration	20%	10	8	7	5	8
Analysis Capabilities	20%	9	8	7	6	7
Cost	15%	4	6	7	9	6
Reporting	15%	7	9	7	9	6
Weighted Score	100%	7.85	7.25	6.7	7.9	6.9
Rank		2	3	5	1	4

The five criteria on which these tools have been analyzed on, are Ease of use, Cost, Integration, Analysis capabilities, Dashboards

I have explained each criterion and also given reasons according to my analysis for the scores allotted to each tool in the above table.

Ease of use

This is the most important metric for any tool. Since Business Intelligence has been finding its application in every industry, a variety of users are using BI tools and several new users are being introduced to BI tools.

Weight-30%.

Qlikview scores the maximum points in this feature because of its simplified search and filtering feature. The automatic data associations provided by Qlikview reduces the work a user has to do. Oracle BI also comes close because of its usability. IBM Cognos lacks in this metric because of its confusing UI and ambiguous errors.

Integration

A BI tool cannot exist in its entirety, meaning data has to come from different sources. With how many databases/data sources the tool integrates with and with what ease, is evaluated in this criteria. Integration is also concerned with workflow and collaboration of the tools with different applications.

Weightage-20%

OBIEE tops this particular rating because of its wide range of products that offer integration and interfacing with a variety of databases and applications like Excel etc. It also has a seamless integration with Big data. Qlikview lacks in this particular aspect as there is no integration with big data which is quite an important requirement these days. Birst does pretty well because of integrating ETL capabilities. Cognos and MicroStrategy also do well in this aspect.

Analysis Capabilities

This criteria entails different analytical features of a BI tool. Examples of such features are- OLAP predictive modelling, data mining, trend indications etc. This is pretty important while gaining insightful insights into data.

Weight-20%

OBIEE gains the maximum rating because of a comprehensive provision of all the important capabilities like Ad Hoc Analysis, OLAP, predictive analysis and profit analysis. MicroStrategy also provide the same features but lacks a little in advanced analytics. Qlikview scores the minimum because of lack of OLAP.

Reporting

Reporting is one of the main feature that a BI tool provides to an end user. This feature comprises of ad-hoc reporting, automatic scheduled reporting and dashboard capabilities.

Weight-15%

Qlikview is one of the best reporting tool along with MicroStrategy because of a comprehensive coverage of all the reporting capabilities mentioned above along with a lot of customization options provided to the user. Birst lacks in this aspect. OBIEE also has stellar reporting capabilities.

Cost

This is the cost effectiveness of the tool. Since many small to mid-sized organizations are using BI, it is important for tools to be reasonably priced according to the value they provide. The costs of a BI tool varies according to the software package and also upon the number of users.

Weight-15%

Considering ownership costs for individual users Qlikview is the cheapest followed by Cognos. OBIEE is the costliest. MicroStrategy and Birst fall between Qlikview and OBIEE in their pricing.

Conclusion

According to my weighted analysis Qlikview is the best. OBIEE comes close. Cost makes the difference between the two. IBM Cognos gets the minimum socre. Of course, this analysis is limited to only 5 criterion and selection of a good BI tool should be based on how it fits your requirements.