Most businesses consider Business Intelligence to be a critical tool for their current and future business strategies. According to Forbes, 54% of enterprises are adherents of this opinion. BI tools help transform company-owned data into ready analytical formats (reports, dashboards, etc.). The range of issues that business analytics helps to solve is very wide (product prioritization, supply chain optimization, workflow optimization, etc.). All BI products are designed primarily for making informed and effective decisions to optimize business activities in general.

Consider the main tools of business intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects is a flexible, scalable information infrastructure for discovering, exploring, and presenting data to make better business decisions. The key features of this system are:

• reporting and analysis;
• visualization and data analytics;
• integration with the Microsoft Office package.

Datapine is a one-stop platform for data visualization and business intelligence. The tool allows data scientists and other business users to use different data sources, perform advanced data analysis, create intuitive business dashboards, get answers and draw the right conclusions.

Microstrategy is a modern business intelligence software (integrated reporting, analytics and monitoring). The tool combines fast logical and factual capabilities to provide real-time assessment with third-party data analysis. Microstrategy also allows to process unstructured textual information, that can be further analyzed by specialists using a text analytics platform.

Qlik Sense is a data visualization, exploration and monitoring tool, business intelligence platform with in-memory associative search with built-in ETL tools. The wide functionality of the tool allows to collect data from disparate sources into a single information system. The associative data model provides the ability to explore data in any direction, understand the relationships of data and see all the relationships between them. These and other Qlik Sense features have made it one of the best and most popular BI tools. DataLabs develops custom BI solutions based on Qlik, focused on effective business management. Detailed information can be found here.

Sisense is a software BI tool that combines dynamic and powerful text analysis features. This allows users to transform text into valuable insights.

Zoho Analytics is a platform for self-service BI and data analysis, as well as internal and external information discovery. The tool allows to download, synchronize data from different sources (spreadsheets, applications, etc.), create and share dashboards and reports. Zoho Analytics offers connectors for rational databases and NoSQL databases and connects to cloud databases.

Microsoft Power BI is a set of data analysis services that allow to turn unrelated enterprise data sources (databases, data from cloud sources, the Internet, text files, Excel files) into reports, presentations and business plans. Power BI includes: Power BI Desktop – data models and reports creating); Online service Power BI (SaaS) – reports publication; Power BI Mobile – reports viewing on mobile devices and tablets.

Tableau is a BI tool for data discovery and visualization. The tool provides an easy process for analyzing, visualizing and sharing data without the help of IT specialists. Tableau belongs to the «self-service» category, providing all the opportunities for users to work independently.

Oracle BI is a business intelligence software product (interactive and published reports, KPI monitoring, business process monitoring). The platform supports different data sources and combines data from these sources in one report.