7 Cloud Business Intelligence Solutions to Help You Work Smarter

Your company captures new data every day — often spread across multiple reporting tools. Business intelligence solutions combine your company data in one place so you can extract rich insights and drive smarter business decisions.

What Are Business Intelligence Solutions? 

Cloud-based business intelligence solutions are business apps hosted on virtual networks. BI services synthesize data to equip your organization with dashboards, KPIs and other valuable analytics. Armed with real-time data and predictive insights, your business can quickly respond to business issues and opportunities.

For companies looking to leverage data without added hardware and infrastructure costs, cloud-based analytics and BI platforms are an attractive option. With no additional hardware needed, cloud BI solutions also require minimal implementation and administrative costs.

Both small businesses to enterprise-level organizations have begun to adopt cloud-based BI services to gain real-time reporting and actionable insights. With all your data in one location, assessing the health of your business down to individual departments and campaigns has never been simpler.

Learn more business use cases for BI analytics. Of course, not every business intelligence solution is created equal. Here are some leading BI solutions providers to help guide your decision:

SAS

SAS is one of the largest and most popular providers of business intelligence solutions. Through visual analytics, you get real-time reports of your network diagram, decision trees and other BI analysis without the need to extensively code and customize anything.

This BI solution offers innovative collaboration tools to industries including communications, healthcare, manufacturing, banking, education and more. You can easily spot data anomalies and forecast business outcomes. Many SAS BI users depend on analytics reports to make more informed business decisions. SAS BI solutions are a great tool for data mining, data visualization, forecasting and statistical analysis.

Adaptive Insights

Adaptive Insights offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) to manage your financial planning, consolidation, reporting and more. The dashboard for reporting, data exploration and data mining pulls in data from sales, HR, marketing and other professional services to provide an overview of your business operations.

Business intelligence solutions from Adaptive Insights cater toward medium- to enterprise-level businesses in multiple industries including business services, software and technology, healthcare, nonprofit, education, retail and more. Adaptive Insights has helped thousands of organizations worldwide bring their balance sheets, cash flow plans, budgets and expense plans to competitive levels.

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI focuses on visualization to connect your data to insight. Instead of poring over columns within Excel spreadsheets, you gain clear and customizable charts, graphs, diagrams and reporting visuals that you can easily share with others.

The platform connects to live data sources to offer an accurate depiction of your company’s health. The data shaping and modeling capabilities of Power BI Desktop also help ease the time-intensive process of preparing data to analyze.

BIME by Zendesk

BIME offers simple cloud-based business intelligence through data visualization. The company was among the first cloud analytics companies to leverage Google’s BigQuery. BIME’s user-friendly applications make it easy for anyone to access and analyze data

. BIME has capitalized on big data and cloud-based data warehousing trends through adapters for over 35 on-premises and cloud-based repositories. With BIME, you can gather data in real time or remotely through its scalable solution, which offers the flexibility to customize data elements.

IBM Cognos Analytics

It’s no surprise that IBM has its hand in the cloud-based BI market with Cognos Analytics. IBM’s Cognos also integrates with its predictive analytics service SPSS to drive better business decisions.

Cognos and SPSS are used in IBM’s Education Cloud infrastructure while its BI apps are used across nearly every industry. IBM’s data collection method provides dynamic queries and broad data for a scalable and user-friendly solution, reducing data analysis time by 50% and boosting ROI 20%.

GoodData

GoodData helps ISVs and companies in finance, hospitality, healthcare, media, restaurants and retail monetize business data. Designed for large-scale analytics distribution inside and outside of your organization, GoodData’s cloud platform is also scalable and secure for data collection and analysis.

GoodData boasts an impressive list of Fortune 500 clients, including HP. Users can share and collaborate SaaS, structured and unstructured data on its platform.

The BI solution recently added Extensible Analytics Engine, which uses its proprietary Multidimensional Analytics Query Language to enable users to apply metrics in many contexts without modifying metric definitions.

Like some of the other BI services mentioned, GoodData offers customizable data and a user-friendly console.

Birst

Birst offers a complete cloud-based BI solution, enabling your business to load data into cloud marts and warehouses. Users can take advantage of on-demand query, dashboards, analysis, visualization and reporting tools.

Unlike other business intelligence solutions, Birst easily integrates with some popular cloud apps such as Salesforce. With customers including Sunny Delight and American Express, Birst BI solutions can be applied across a variety of industries.

Birst offers Data Discovery and Enterprise Editions, which include visual discovery, dashboards, mobile analytics and ad-hoc analysis.

Deploying BI Solutions for Your Business

Business intelligence solutions are only as good as your data. Before extracting insights from BI tools, you need to prepare your data to be analyzed. Poorly organized, unstructured or outdated data could compromise the credibility of your BI dashboard and insights.

To verify you have the most up-to-date information, you’ll likely need an experienced partner to guide the deployment of your BI solution.

Companies often underestimate the work involved post-deployment. Once set up, you need to continually funnel more data into your BI solution to keep it fresh and relevant. Without proper education, employees also won’t take advantage of helpful BI reports. Championing BI adoption across your business is essential to ensure team members are capitalizing on the rich reports and knowledge at their fingertips.

Agile IT has helped companies of all sizes successfully prepare data for BI and implement these solutions across the organization. We work with you to regularly add data and reports to the platform so users always have accurate data.

Interested in implementing a BI solution to drive smarter decision-making? Learn more about Agile IT’s Power BI services or talk to a specialist today.