10 Cloud Analytics & BI Platforms For Business
With apps and data headed into the cloud, analytics and business intelligence can't be far behind. Here are 10 options, ranging from simple data-visualization tools to complete cloud suites.
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Cloud-based business intelligence arrived soon after the first wave of cloud applications, but several early pioneers -- LucidEra, Oco, PivotLink -- didn't survive. Fears about putting data in the cloud were among the early impediments to success. Now that mission-critical apps and sensitive corporate data are increasingly moving online, it makes sense that cloud-based analytics and BI platforms are gaining customers.
What's the evidence that data is moving into the cloud along with applications? Our InformationWeek 2015 Analytics, BI, and Information Management Survey, for example, finds that cloud-based data warehousing services show the biggest gains in adoption of any information management category, jumping to 34% adoption among respondents, up from just 24% in 2014.
According to "Analytics in the Cloud," a January 2015 report by Enterprise Management Associates, adopters cite time-to-delivery of analytics and BI as primary business motivation for choosing cloud options. Time to value for analytical initiatives and improved agility stand out as the most important technical drivers. Finally, the top three financial drivers behind the move to cloud-based analytics and BI platforms are minimized hardware and infrastructure cost, reduced implementation cost, and reduced administrative cost, in that order.
The options covered in this collection range from complete data warehousing and BI suites in the cloud, like Birst, GoodData, and MicroStrategy, to far simpler data exploration and data visualization options, like SAP Lumira Cloud and Tibco Spotfire Cloud. In between there's IBM Watson Analytics and Microsoft Power BI. You'll also find options favored in big-data circles, such as Bime and Tableau Software, and one option favored in financial circles, Adaptive Insight.
What you won't find in this collection are application-specific platforms like Salesforce Wave and add-ons thereto, like C9. Also excluded were planning- and finance-oriented corporate performance management apps, like Anaplan, Host Analytics, and Tidemark. Advanced analytics products are also absent, although Watson Analytics and Tibco Spotfire Cloud are among the options here that do offer some of those bells and whistles.
Pricing of these services ranges from free -- generally with storage caps and data-source limitations -- to $2,000 per year for a five-user workgroup edition, to hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars for a full-BI-stack deployment with terabyte-scale data warehouses managed in the cloud. Most of these vendors can also help you with on-premises and hybrid deployments, though Adaptive Planning and Bime are the cloud purists here.
Read on for a closer look at data access options, analysis features, and, in many cases, edition and pricing details.
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Formerly known as Adaptive Planning, this company changed its name in 2014 to reflect a broader focus encompassing both corporate performance management (CPM) and business intelligence. The company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite started with tools for the CFO's office to handle financial planning, consolidation, and reporting, but the 2013 acquisition of cloud vendor MyDials added general-purpose BI tools and dashboard-style data exploration, reporting, and visualization capabilities as well as KPI insights geared to sales, marketing, HR, professional services, and line-of-business domains.
Adaptive Insights still competes most directly with cloud-based CPM options from Anaplan, Host Analytics, Oracle, and Tidemark, but it also might get a look from companies that would otherwise look at Birst, GoodData, and other cloud BI options described in this collection.
Founded in France in 2009, BIME is making a push into the North American market through a year-old office in Kansas City, Mo. The company was among the first cloud analytics players to leverage Google BigQuery. It's capitalizing on the big data and cloud-based data warehousing trends by offering adapters for more than 35 on-premises and cloud-based repositories.
With BIME's V6 release late last year, the service offers automatic charting, suggested visualizations, optimization for touch devices, and the ability to create dashboards and pivot tables "as easily as working with productivity suites like Microsoft Office or Google Docs." We've heard these ease-of-use claims before, but you can try it for free and decide for yourself. Pricing starts at $490 per month (billed annually) for two analysts and ten dashboard consumers, or $690 per month including adapters for big data repositories including Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, SAP Hana, and HP Vertica (the last two being available both on-premises or in the cloud). BIME-supplied cloud storage starts at $250 per month.
Birst offers a complete BI stack in the sky, enabling you to load data into cloud marts and warehouses and use on-demand query, analysis, visualization, dashboard, and reporting tools. Birst also integrates with popular cloud applications, doing a lot historically with Salesforce. Now that Salesforce is developing its own Wave analytics cloud, Birst is diversifying. In 2014 the company partnered with NetSuite and SAP. It also pushed more deeply into the healthcare and government arenas and bolstered its European cloud offerings and embedded BI programs.
Birst offers two editions of its services: Birst Data Discovery supports visual discovery, ad hoc analysis, dashboards, and mobile analytics; Birst Enterprise Edition adds automated data warehousing, data mash-ups, and dimensional database management in the cloud.
GoodData offers a complete BI stack in the cloud, but it looks beyond the warehouse to embrace third-party enrichment data, public data, and big data sources. Gartner praises GoodData for enabling companies to mashup their own data blends and offer subscription-based data services to clients, partners, and suppliers. GoodData customers typically have hundreds of users, and the company is ranked highly in TrustRadius user reviews.
Beyond the customer analytics and BI tools -- visual data discovery, exploration, collaboration, reporting, and so on -- GoodData offers analytic applications for marketing, sales, service, social, and Yammer deployments. GoodData says it has more than 30,000 data warehouses under management in the cloud with a guarantee of 99.5% uptime, which it says translates to a little more than three hours of downtime per month. Connectors and data-transformation routines are supplied for traditional enterprise data stores as well as cloud applications and social sources. Provisioning and automated system management tools help deliver on the vendor's promise of "BI applications within weeks, not years" and "integrated data sources within days, not weeks."
Watson Analytics is IBM's cloud-based, natural language-assisted data analysis service aimed at ordinary business users. The service takes advantage of multiple technologies developed by IBM to make data analysis easier. Natural-language understanding capabilities from Watson lets you explore data by typing in questions in English. InfoSphere Data Refinery capabilities assess the data you upload and automatically suggest data-cleansing steps, such as deleting duplicates or merging records that appear to be related. The Catalyst Engine developed for SPSS analytics automatically finds correlations and trends in data. Cognos Project Neo technology suggests which type of visualization to use to best illustrate a trend, outlier, correlation, or other trait.
IBM Watson is a freemium service, so you can access it online and start using it for free, though data storage is limited to 500 megabytes. An upgrade to Watson Analytics Personal, which costs $30 per user per month, lets you store up to 2 gigabytes of data. IBM can bring this technology to workgroups and enterprises, of course, but the public cloud service is aimed at individuals. Users can share data visualizations by downloading PNG or PDF image files or by emailing views to collaborators from within the service.
Power BI is Microsoft's cloud-based suite of data access, data management, and data analysis tools. In a January upgrade, it's becoming a stand-alone service separated from its former Office 365 home. Now a 'freemium' service, Power BI is available at no charge with 1 GB of storage per user. A paid Power BI Pro upgrade will cost $9.99 per user, per month and provide 10 gigabytes of storage, support for up to 1 million rows of streaming data per hour, and Active Directory-controlled collaboration and on-premises data-access capabilities. With the Pro version, IT and power users can expose corporate data sources, trusting that Active Directory can be used to lock down access rights and privileges. The Azure data market and Bing maps add invaluable public data sources. Charts, graphs, dashboards, and other visualizations can be developed in Power BI Designer, free, downloadable desktop software that will undoubtedly challenge Tableau Software.
A public preview of the new Power BI offers six new features: dashboards that combine multiple data visualizations; new visualizations, including combo charts, fill maps, gauges, tree maps, and funnel charts; connectors to popular SaaS services including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Marketo, Salesforce, and Zendesk; a mobile app for iPad (long overdue); live connectivity to SQL Server Analysis Services so you don't have to move on-premises data into the cloud; and the free Power BI Designer software, which lets you author and publish visual charts and reports.
MicroStrategy delivers its software together with a Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine, dubbed PRIME, through MicroStrategy Cloud. Yes, it's the company's on-premises software delivered as a managed service, but MicroStrategy promises you can get up and running within 48 hours, giving you the agility of cloud with the proven scalability of a BI and analytics platform that powers giant customers including Facebook, MetLife, Netflix, and Wells Fargo. MicroStrategy handles all infrastructure, deployment, and administrative concerns as well as user training, and PRIME is available to ensure speed-of-thought analysis.
MicroStrategy Cloud can host your data or connect to on-premises repositories. Applications and interfaces can be customized per user or application, and MicroStrategy is well known for state-of-the-art mobile BI support. The deployment architecture incorporates encryption, customer isolation, and multi-factor authentication.
SAP BusinessObjects' data exploration and data visualization platform is Lumira, which is offered as a desktop, server, or cloud offering. Lumira Cloud provides a Web-based "Vis & Compose" interface that's similar to the desktop software. Using the free edition of the service, which includes 1 gigabyte of storage, you can load datasets and build a variety of data visualizations in a browser or on a tablet device. You can also grab URLs for these views and embed visualizations on public Websites.
SAP Lumira Cloud Enterprise Edition provides 5 gigabytes of shared storage and supports private collaboration among multiple users with user access management and permission controls. Both editions let you gather data visualizations into reports or infographic-style data stories, complete with captions and pictures that support data-driven decisions.
Tableau is well known for its desktop data visualization software as well as server-based products for the enterprise. Tableau Public lets you download a free version of the software -- with limited data-access options including Access, Excel, and OData -- and then create a wide range of charts, graphs and other types of data visualizations. These views can be published to the Tableau Public site and embedded in blogs and on public sites.
Tableau Public lets you analyze as much data as you like (on your desktop), but everything you publish is public. You can upgrade to Tableau Public Premium to get access to more than just Excel and flat files; it also lets you keep selected data private and supports larger data sets. Serious workgroup and enterprise collaboration demands Tableau's server-based software.
TIBCO Spotfire Cloud offers sophisticated data visualization software online in personal and workgroup editions. Sportfire Cloud Personal, which costs $30 per month or $300 per year, lets you import, explore, and visualize common spreadsheet and flat files, plus SAS data files and ESRI shape files. Storage is capped at 100 gigabytes, but you can publish as many charts as you'd like. A new Recommendations feature suggests best-fit visualizations for the data and types of analyses you're after.
Spotfire Cloud Work Group supports private collaboration among five users, 250 gigabytes of storage, and unlimited public sharing for $200 per month or $2,000 per year. This option provides 18 additional connectors for popular databases and big data sources. It also supports a handful of more sophisticated visualizations, including heat maps, 3D scatterplots, summary tables, and map charts. Advanced analytics options with the Work Group edition include predictive modeling, k-means clustering, data relationships, and an integrated R engine.
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