Introduction
In today’s highly competitive and complex business landscape, organizations need to make strategic decisions quickly based on accurate insights gleaned from their data assets. Business intelligence Companies empower to visualize, analyze and optimize their data to drive impactful business outcomes. The global BI software market is thriving, expected to reach $34 billion by 2026 according to ResearchAndMarkets. As data volumes grow exponentially, companies are investing in innovative BI solutions that leverage game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing. This article explores the top 10 leading BI software vendors that are driving the future of data analytics.
1. Microsoft
As a tech titan, Microsoft offers a robust suite of BI platforms that help organizations of all sizes unlock insights to outmaneuver competition.
Power BI
Microsoft Power BI has emerged as a leader in intuitive, self-service BI tools that allow anyone to easily connect to data sources, visualize information and share interactive reports across an organization. Key capabilities include:
- Automated AI insights that detect trends, anomalies and drivers behind metrics.
- Natural language querying via voice or text to get answers instantly.
- paginated reports optimized for communicating insights through PDFs or printed mediums.
- Hundreds of drag-and-drop customizable visualizations to explore data and create rich interactive dashboards.
- Built-in collaboration tools to discuss insights and share dashboards.
- Available across desktop, mobile and web to enable ubiquitous analytics.
With Power BI, business analysts can get actionable insights without relying on data scientists. It has over 200,000 customers including industry giants like Adobe, DHL, and Dominos Pizza.
Azure
Power BI seamlessly leverages the robust cloud infrastructure of Microsoft Azure to enhance capabilities. Azure provides options to:
- Scale capacity up and down to accommodate usage spikes.
- Ensure security compliance through role-based access and encryption.
- Connect to hundreds of data sources, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
- Leverage technologies like machine learning, stream analytics, data lakes and more.
The tight integration between Power BI and Azure creates a formidable BI solution.
2. Tableau
Tableau pioneered an intuitive, visual approach to exploring data that revolutionized the entire BI industry. Its solutions help everyday business users uncover impactful insights through an engaging, interactive experience.
VizQL
Tableau’s proprietary VizQL technology translates drag-and-drop actions into data queries and then instantly generates corresponding visualizations. This eliminates traditional development cycles, allowing users to analyze data at the speed of thought.
Tableau Public
Tableau also cultivates an engaged community of users through Tableau Public, a free platform where anyone can access a wide array of data visualization templates and dashboards published by others. Public users have contributed over 2 million public visualizations to date, fostering idea exchange.
With capabilities like “Explain Data” that automatically highlights insightful trends, Tableau solutions enhance and accelerate data understanding for the average business user.
3. Sisense
Sisense stands out in the BI landscape for its ability to handle complex big data analytics across large, multi-source datasets with high speed and scalability. Its patented In-Chip technology accelerates complex queries orders of magnitude faster than competitors.
In-Chip Analytics
Most BI tools rely solely on CPUs for processing analytic computations. Sisense utilizes both CPUs and GPUs, distributing processing across computer chips instead of overloading the CPUs. This massively boosts performance, especially for complex queries across high data volumes.
Sisense Fusion
Sisense Fusion enables users to import, prepare, analyze and visualize extremely large and disparate datasets from multiple sources within a unified environment. This simplifies highly complex analytics across diverse data. Users can rapidly combine data from relational and non-relational databases, cloud applications, big data sources like Hadoop, flat files and more.
With performance advantages like In-Chip processing, Sisense can crunch billions of rows of data from diverse sources to reveal valuable insights.
4. SAS
SAS has four decades of experience developing business intelligence, analytics, data management and data mining software tools used by over 80,000 organizations worldwide. Its solutions help data-rich companies optimize operations and make smarter decisions.
SAS Viya
SAS Viya represents the next generation of SAS analytics capabilities. This cloud-native, microservices-based platform features AI-powered natural language search, automated insights, advanced analytics customization, seamless data visualization and more.
Machine Learning Capabilities
A pioneer in artificial intelligence, SAS integrates machine learning capabilities across its platforms to enable predictive analytics, forecasting models, sentiment analysis and other smart features. Users can build models without coding via an intuitive graphical interface. SAS Model Manager aids model monitoring, retraining and deployment.
Global brands like Volvo, NBCUniversal and Banco Santander rely on SAS solutions to maximize return on their data investments.
5. IBM
As a longstanding technology leader, IBM offers a vast portfolio of advanced analytics and business intelligence software to help organizations optimize data-driven operations. Its solutions are built for scalability and security required by large enterprises.
Cognos Analytics
Cognos Analytics is IBM’s flagship BI platform, providing an intuitive web-based interface for monitoring performance through interactive reports, dashboards and scorecards. Users of all skill levels can easily create views into key business data.
Watson Analytics
Infused with artificial intelligence capabilities from IBM Watson, this solution allows users to automatically discover patterns, trends and actionable insights without complex data science skills. Natural language dialog helps guide users. Watson Analytics won the 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award.
Global companies like FedEx, Lloyds Banking Group and Etihad Airways leverage IBM analytics solutions to guide strategy.
6. Oracle
Oracle powers data-driven success at over 420,000 customers worldwide. Its extensive suite of cloud analytics platforms help businesses optimize data analysis to accelerate growth.
Oracle Analytics Cloud
This unified platform enables self-service analytics, enterprise reporting, augmented analytics, natural language processing and more for actionable insights. Smart visualization recommendations expedite discovering insights.
Advanced Analytics Capabilities
Oracle augments its BI solutions with advanced functionality powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Options include predictive analytics, data mining, text analytics, location intelligence, and real-time personalization to engage customers.
Oracle enables the data foundation for industry leaders like Toyota, McDonalds, and UPS to optimize performance.
7. Qlik
Qlik helps organizations optimize how they gather, organize and analyze data to uncover hidden insights that can transform business decisions. Its Associative Engine sets it apart from competitors.
Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense enables intuitive self-service oriented analysis with smart search-based visualizations, natural language querying and conversational analytics. Users can dynamically explore information along any path to make discoveries.
Associative Engine
Qlik’s proprietary Associative Engine indexes and understands inherent relationships across all data sources. This supports associative exploration and analysis to reveal insights beyond what queries alone can uncover.
Global brands like Cisco, Levi’s and Fanatics rely on Qlik’s Associative Engine as the platform for driving data discoveries.
8. SAP
As a leader in enterprise application software, SAP offers scalable, robust BI solutions that integrate tightly with its other ERP, CRM and enterprise systems. This accelerates widespread adoption across organizations.
SAP Analytics Cloud
This solution offers intuitive analytics capabilities including planning, predictive analytics, augmented analytics, desktop reporting and more. Unified insights help enterprises accelerate decisions.
Integration with SAP ERP
Seamless integration with SAP’s enterprise resource planning systems like SAP S/4HANA allows customers to extract and analyze live transactional data from across key business functions. This adds invaluable context for insights.
Eighty percent of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system, providing a treasure trove of data for its BI solutions.
9. MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy offers enterprise analytics and mobility solutions that extend BI capabilities to everyone across an organization. Its HyperIntelligence products aim to make insights ubiquitous.
MicroStrategy 2019
The company’s latest update features improvements like a hypermedia analytics engine, AI-driven assistance, enhanced enterprise mobility and distribution of insights.
HyperIntelligence
MicroStrategy HyperIntelligence overlays actionable analytics widgets directly into commonly used business web pages and applications to transform BI into flash insights. Users never leave their workflows to find answers.
Organizations like McKesson, Kroger and eBay leverage MicroStrategy to make analytics accessible enterprise-wide.
10. ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot provides search and AI-driven analytics platforms that allow business users to uncover data insights quickly through Google-like natural language searches.
Search & AI-Driven Analytics
ThoughtSpot allows users to type or voice search business questions in plain language. Behind the scenes, AI instantly analyzes aggregated data and generates relevant charts, graphs and insights to display.
ThoughtSpot Everywhere
This capability allows ThoughtSpot users to access analytics on the go through mobile devices and embed interactive analytics into any app or website. This brings insights to employees wherever they work.
Innovative customers like Walmart, 7-Eleven and PetCo utilize ThoughtSpot to empower every employee with data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
The business intelligence and analytics software market will continue evolving alongside advances in cloud computing, AI and big data. While BI power houses like Microsoft, IBM and SAS offer robust solutions for large enterprises, nimble disruptors like ThoughtSpot are emerging to transform analytics with inventive capabilities. Companies need to choose solutions that balance ease-of-use to accelerate user adoption with flexibility and scalability to accommodate growing data complexity and analytics needs over time. The future looks bright for platforms that magnify the insights within reach for organizations to gain a competitive edge.