Picture credit: iStock

In today’s competitive and evolving market, most businesses are focused on driving growth and looking for better ways to derive insights from their historical data. Business Intelligence (BI) tools are the go-to option to transform unstructured data into practical insights that inform strategic business decisions to increase operational efficiency, understand market trends, identify new revenue potentials and business opportunities. 

BI tools enable businesses to retrieve, analyze, monitor, and report data by displaying end-to-end KPIs in the form of dashboards and graphical representations using the Pareto principle and create a clear view of all the information at their disposal.

Here are our top 10 recommendations of some popular and highly regarded BI tools to help you uncover real and actionable insights. These tools have been chosen based on their strategic features, including but not restricted to augmented analytics, querying, data visualization, security, mobile BI, connectivity, and ease of reporting.

1. Microsoft Power BI is a robust, efficient, affordable, and excellent data visualization tool where large amounts of data can be stored in the cloud and on-premise.
2. Tableau Desktop and Server is a user-friendly tool used to administer, share, and publish data on data visualization platforms. Apart from security, collaboration, scalability, and mobile support, it also has a drag-and-drop feature used for on-premise deployment.
3. Qlik Sense is a data discovery and Windows-based application where users can create interactive dashboards and graphs, online and offline, which can also be installed on mobile devices.
4. QlikView is an associative technology and performance-based data visualization tool that has online community support, enterprise-scale reporting, and an in-memory OLAP analytical engine. 
5. SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite is a powerful GUI analytical and transactional tool with query performance and web intelligence features that provide insights to users anywhere and anytime to improve decision making on-premise or on cloud-based platforms.
6. Fine Report is a mobile-app based deployment and integration tool which has the easiest and most innovative design pattern. It has impressive features including reporting, smart data entry, and data visualization.
7. KNIME analytics is an end-to-end data science platform based on integrating, linking, and analyzing business domains with various classification, regression, and clustering models.
8. DataBox helps measure, calculate and track business KPIs without coding and can be deployed on the cloud, SaaS, web, and mobile platforms.
9. Metabase users can ask questions about data anytime. Many databases can be integrated, embedded, and it can easily generate powerful dashboards.
10. Stitch helps analyze data consolidated from different sources from a central location. It builds and manages a data pipeline and is an extensible, customer-based ETL platform that shares and creates visualizations for many forms of data.

Build Accurate and Robust Business Strategies With These Tools

These are the top tools businesses should consider to execute analytical workflows to build accurate and robust business strategies. Here are some key points to consider during your data journey: 

• Businesses can leverage any type of data irrespective of the source.
• BI tools can be utilized by any business irrespective of the size of the organization.
• The best BI tools generate decipherable data reports for users to gain a holistic view of the operations and empower them to make informed decisions to align with their business strategy.
• Consistent insights-gathering cycles using BI tools will improve decision-making capabilities and provide better recommendations.

How Nisum Can Help

Nisum is a long-tenured expert in Data Science, Data Engineering, and Data Visualization which uses the most future-forward technology to turn the data into actionable insights that produce business value. Our Insights and Analytics team empowers the customer to make smart decisions based on real-time, fact-based intelligence. We also help them pick the right analytical tools to apply, analyze, and transform data into easy to understand graphical dashboards and scorecards. 

We have helped many businesses build accurate, live stories for customers using petabytes of unstructured data and extracted insights efficiently and effectively in a robust manner. To learn more about our services, contact us.