Current BI landscape
Over the last 20 years, several vendors have built products to satisfy BI needs for organizations and this space is pretty crowded with big vendors and niche players that include Tableau desktop, Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Qlick, and DOMO. Let's review the key features provided by the BI vendors.
Key features provided by BI tools
Most of the features offered by BI vendors fit into one of these categories:
- Interactive reports: It helps users to analyze data and support decision-making using slice-and-dice, drill down, trends, averages, percentile, and support ad hoc queries with ability to export data/charts.
- Executive dashboards: It presents data to business leaders in easy-to-understand Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and summary charts/tables. These dashboards are typically refreshed at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) based on the business need.
- Integrations: Integrates with various data sources to report stats on them and then publish results to websites, e-mails, and social media.
- Metadata management: It tracks the relationships between datasets, calculations, and hierarchies.
