From the various BI tools available in the market, 5 tools
have been selected for evaluation. These are as follows:
1) IBM Cognos:
IBM Cognos provides an integrated BI platform that provides good flexibility
and the ability to query packages in an ad-hoc way. It is ideal for large
deployments across an enterprise that are typically centrally managed.
IBM Cognos Analytics also provides good collaboration across teams, organizations,
and ecosystems to amplify value and offer good scalability, governance,
security and overall performance.
Unique selling proposition:
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence is a web-based, integrated business
intelligence suite that provides tools right from reporting and analysis to
score-carding and monitoring of events.
2) SAS:
Business Intelligence and Analytics suite provides excellent predictive
modeling with innovative visualization. Its interactive capabilities along with
its diverse set of use cases, caters the analytic requirements right from an
enterprise level organization to traditional user such as data scientists, IT
developers and power users within these organization.
License cost can sometimes be a concern for SAS customers especially when
there are wider deployments across an entire enterprise.
Unique selling proposition:
SAS meet both, the
enterprise needs of IT, as well as the self-service needs of the business.
This flexibility differentiates SAS from other vendors in the market.
3) Microsoft BI and analytics:
The Microsoft BI and analytics
suite supports different BI use cases and analytic requirement. Scalability is one
of the major strength of this product. It ranks very well for data volume
accessed, with an average data size of 62 TB, which is higher than any of its
competitors. It also provides cloud-based services and collaboration
capabilities through a subscription-based model using Office 365.
Microsoft BI and analytics also
has a deployment with an average number of end users of 6,000 which in comparison
to other products is higher.
Unique selling proposition:
With a strong customer base, the
solution provides built-in connectivity to on-premises SQL Server Analysis
Services, which will allow organizations to leverage existing data assets
without having to move to in the cloud.
4) Tableau
One of the most popular BI visualization tool, Tableau is the perceived
market leader among all the other BI tools that are out there. Tableau
supports a wide range of data sources from SQL to MDX, as well as a number of
Hadoop distributions, support for Google BigQuery, Salesforce and Google
Analytics.
Tableau also provides a robust mobile client. Visualizations are optimized
for mobile devices and its touch-optimized controls makes accessing and viewing
data easy and intuitive.
Unique selling Proposition
Tableau easy to use visual based data discovery capabilities enables
business users and analysts to play with in data even without extensive skills
or training with any previous BI platforms.
5) Qlikview
QlikView, much like tableau, provides ease-of-use for both IT
professionals and non-technical users. It provides a self-contained,
tightly integrated development platform for building intuitive and interactive
dashboard applications. It offers a highly interactive dashboard,
centralized dashboard application development for an enterprise features to
support governed data discovery.
Unique Selling proposition
Its key strength lies in the fact that it can combine data from diverse
sources such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, SQL Server, SAP and Excel. QlikView’s also
ranks high in customer loyalty, satisfactory performance, and is known for its
product quality and overall market position.
Comparative Analysis
In order to compare these BI tools to see how they stand against each
other, we have used a weighted score model to analyze their strengths and
weakness. To do so we have identified the following evaluation criteria based
on which we make our comparison.
- Reporting: Reporting help users convert data into actionable knowledge. They allow users to better understand the analysis within reports, and the underlying data those reports are based on, to support better decision-making. Some of the basic features should include drill down through reports, conduct slice and dice OLAP analysis etc
- Data Source Support and Integration: This criteria tries to check the different data sources that the tool supports and ability to provide user-defined measures, sets, groups and hierarchies.
- Analytic Dashboards & Content: The quality of visualization and exploration capabilities and the ability of the tool to create highly interactive dashboards and content with ease of use that can be later consumed by others.
- Platform: The different platform that the tool can run on and its ability to deliver contents in an interactive mode on multiple computing environment such as cloud deployment, web-based, mobile or stand-alone platforms.
- Customer Support:This criteria includes the ways customers receive technical or account support. It compares the type of support available (e.g. Email, Phone, FAQ), availability of user groups, service-level agreements etc.
Based on these parameters the weighted analysis table looks something like this.
Evaluation criteria are given a weight-age based on their importance that is
required in any standard BI tool. Each vendors is scored on a scale of 1 to 5
with 1 = poor, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent and 5 = outstanding.
| Criteria | Weight | IBM Cognos | SAS | Microsoft | Tableau | QlikView |
| Reporting |
30%
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
4
|
4
|
| Data Source Support and Integration |
20%
|
3
|
4
|
4
|
5
|
5
|
| Analytic Dashboards |
30%
|
4
|
4
|
3
|
5
|
4
|
| Platform |
10%
|
3
|
4
|
4
|
5
|
4
|
| Customer Support |
10%
|
2
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
4
|
| Score |
100%
|
3.5
|
3.6
|
3.3
|
4.5
|
4.2
|
| Rank |
4
|
3
|
5
|
1
|
2
|
We have given scores to each of these features based on how predominant they are in these tools. We have also used the Customer Survey Metrics from Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform to base our scoring on.
Once these scores were given we calculated the weighted score for each of the 5 BI tools. Based on this analysis we can see that Tableau has the highest score of 4.5 closely followed by QlikView with a score of 4.2.
SAS, IBM Congos and Microsoft BI have more or less the same score in all the criteria and they are ranked 3,4 and 5 respectively.
Final Verdict
Based on the selected features and the product scores given for each of these features we can see that Tableau is clearly the winner. As written in Gartner's Magic Quadrant report,
"Tableau has clearly defined the market in terms of data discovery, with a focus on helping people see and understand their data. It is currently the perceived market leader with most vendors viewing Tableau as the competitor they most want to be like and to beat"
References:
- http://www.gartner.com/
- https://www.wikipedia.org/
- https://www.yellowfinbi.com/YFCommunityNews-6-Key-Features-of-any-Business-Intelligence-Solution-100207
- https://www.yurbi.com/blog/straight-talk-review-of-tableau-software-the-pros-and-cons/
