As we move towards what is called Big data, it becomes imminent for us to foray into Analytic world to look for one best product which can cater our business needs and provide intelligence best suited to get a usable insight from the 'data junk' that we have. I have done my own analysis of various Business Intelligence and Analytics products that we have today in the market. I have chosen 5 criteria (according to me) that would be most important for a business to look upon to finally seal the deal and chose is at our 'Go to' product.
The 5 products I have chosen are IBM Cognos, Microstrategy, SAP Business Object, Information Builders WebFocus and Tableau
Product Information:
IBM Cognos 
IBM is one of the major Business Intelligence vendors in the market and provides an Enterprise Business Intelligence and very mature Analytics platform. It is designed to enable business users without technical knowledge to extract corporate data, analyze it and assemble reports. Cognos is composed of nearly three dozen software products. Because Cognos is built on open standards, the software products can be used with relational and multidimensional data sources from multiple vendors, including Microsoft, NCR Teradata, SAP and Oracle.
IBM Cognos offers the following BI components:
- IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
- IBM Cognos Performance Management
- IBM Cognos Predictive Analytics
- IBM Cognos Dashboards, Analysis & Reports
- IBM Cognos BI Mobile & Collaboration
Strengths
- Analytics & statistical functionality
- One Single Platform for dashboarding, reporting and analytics and scorecards delivered
- Enterprise BI scalability
- Large data volume accessed in data repositories (in the range of over 10TB)
Weaknesses:
- Doesn’t integrate particularly well with Microsoft Office
- No support is provided for parallel bulk data loader utilities
- Native connectivity to different sources is limited
- IBM is a good example of a real analytics vendor, but they provide plain reporting
- High cost of software
- Low Mobile BI integration
Tableau 
Tableau Software is one of the smaller Business Intelligence vendors in the market providing mainly advanced Data Discovery solutions. Tableau is not particularly sophisticated and may prove inadequate as needs mature. This has recently been addressed to some extent through an interface to R, and with this Tableau maintains ease of use as its primary focus.
Tableau Software offers the following BI components:
- Tableau Desktop (for Anyone)
- Tableau Server (for Organizations)
- Tableau Digital (for Public Websites)
- Tableau Public (for Bloggers)
Strengths
- Speed and ease: The software is fast to install and deploy, no consultants needed. Access data from the rest of your systems quickly and easily
- Self-Service: anyone can use Tableau, no specialists or special training required, Speed of Analysis: because visualization is at their core, people see and understand their data 10-100 times faster than usual BI reports and charts.
- Share your graphics on the web easily
- Data integration with multiple database sources
- Highly cost effective, provides excellent reporting at fairly low cost
Weaknesses
- They don’t offer production reporting.
- There can be many single transactions to make up an enterprise deployment, so companies don’t always see Tableau as an enterprise standard even though they have thousands of users.
- Their high ease of use makes their product less attractive to large service providers as they do not consider it industry standard tool
SAP BusinessObjects: 
SAP BusinessObjects BI is SAP’s Business Intelligence tool, which is a suite of front-end applications that allow business users to view, sort and analyze business intelligence data.
The suite includes the following key applications:
- Crystal Reports -Enables users to design and generate reports
- Xcelsius/Dashboards -Allows users to create interactive dashboards
- Web Intelligence - Provides a self-service environment for creating ad hoc queries and analysis of data both online and offline
- Explorer - Allows users to search through BI data sources using an iTunes-like interface. Users do not have to create queries to search the data and results are shown with a chart that indicates the best information match.
Strengths
- Complete suite of solutions for Data Management, Query Reporting, OLAP Analysis and dashboarding.
- Provide a set of Analytical Applications via third parties.
- Very user friendly User Interface; the product is easy to learn and use.
- Mature system administration and metadata management.
Weaknesses
- Due to the fact that multiple techniques are delivered to support the user to access BI content, not all of the components are completely interchangeable.
- Different designer environments due to different content architectures combined in a single platform.
- Provides fairly plan analytics compared to the cost associated and therefore provides low value to consumer
MicroStrategy 
MicroStrategy is one of the major Business Intelligence vendors in the market providing a complete Enterprise Business Intelligence platform. It takes positives from both old and new business intelligence. It is truly an enterprise solution meeting the demands for regular reporting, complex dashboards and extensive admin, while offering self-service for BI users. It is expensive for organizations with less demanding requirements.
MicroStrategy is one of the major Business Intelligence vendors in the market providing a complete Enterprise Business Intelligence platform. It takes positives from both old and new business intelligence. It is truly an enterprise solution meeting the demands for regular reporting, complex dashboards and extensive admin, while offering self-service for BI users. It is expensive for organizations with less demanding requirements.
MicroStrategy offers the following BI components:
- Agile Analytics
- Scorecards and Dashboards
- Enterprise Reporting
- Advanced and Predictive Analytics
- High Performance BI
- Big Data
Strengths
- Ability to analyze and visualize the largest data volumes
- Rapidly build Information-driven Mobile Apps, one of the leaders in Mobile BI solutions
- Integrates well Microsoft office, multiple databases and low administration complexity
- Deploy quickly via the cloud; including hybrid and flexible versions of cloud / on-premise deployments
- Highly user friendly user interface, provides excellent data visualization and reporting functionality
- Low cost, high performance, and high sales associated to it, and thus provides high value to customers
Weaknesses
- Does not provide full data warehousing stack capabilities such as data movement
- Lack of fully configured application packages (except via partners)
- Various piece functionality (i.e. mobile solution, visualization tool etc.) inherit all MicroStrategy platform capabilities so are dependent on the platform for deployment.
Information Builders 
Information Builders' WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform offers a broad range of analytics capabilities with data integration and application support. It is particularly well suited to operational reporting and dashboards, and to building Web-based analytic applications that require low latency and multiple data sources with production-level scalability in environments without a data warehouse.
Strengths:
- Fully-customized reports with guided ad hoc technology by simply choosing columns, sort criteria, measures, and output formats from drop-down menus.
- Robust report delivery engine with leading-edge event monitoring, provides a single point of control for automation, scheduling, and storage of reports and other critical business content.
- Its most notable features is its "non-persistence," or its ability to run without server power when not accessing or processing data. This means that much less hardware is required.
- Multiple functionalities available to integrate with mobile apps and devices
- Cost effective as software cost is low compared to other products
Weaknesses:
- Its developer interface has been criticized for being less user friendly as it runs with a scripting interface instead of a more user-friendly IDE.
- It lacks a widely adopted data discovery offering, this limits its broader use and the platform's adoption for more complex types of analysis
- Dashboarding and reporting functionality outside its core WebFOCUS and iWay platforms is strictly limited
Criteria for Comparison
Mobile BI: It is the ability of the product to develop and deliver content to mobile devices in a publishing and/or interactive mode. A top rated product is one which takes maximum advantage of mobile devices' native capabilities, such as touchscreen, camera, location awareness and natural-language query to deliver the end product.
With new advancements in Mobile technology, more customers now want integrated BI solutions for their mobile devices.
Data integration: BI tool should be able to take data input from a vast number of databases and data sources. Data integration also includes the how well the products integrates with other similar products and Microsoft office.
It greatly affects other factors such as ease of use and value, therefore this criteria has received second highest weightage (20%)
Metadata management: A product which tops the list should provide a robust and centralized way for administrators to search, capture, store, reuse and publish metadata objects, such as dimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics/key performance indicators (KPIs), and report layout objects, parameters and so on. Administrators should have the ability to promote a business-user-defined data model.
This is the indicator of performance and strength of the analytic tool therefore it has received third highest weightage (15%).
Dashboard, Reporting & Online analytical processing (OLAP): Providing the ability to create highly formatted, print-ready and interactive reports, with or without parameters. Dashboards should allow publishing multi-object, linked reports and parameters with intuitive and interactive displays; user should be able to benefit from visualization components such as gauges, sliders, checkboxes and maps. OLAP is the ability of the tool to allow users to analyze data with fast query and calculation performance, enabling ‘slicing and dicing’ style of analysis. Allowing users to navigate multidimensional drill paths, write-back values to a database for planning and "what if?" modelling.
This is one of the main criteria while choosing a Business Intelligence product and therefore it has the highest weightage (25%).
Ease of Use: This assesses how easily a customer with just basic computer knowledge can understand and use the application, and can understand the data with tool’s data visualization capability.
Value: It is the likely benefits versus the cost. It is one of the main criteria when it comes to choosing product when there is some tough competition between vendors and for this reason it has second highest weightage (20%).
Comparison Table
This table shows comparison of the products on the basis of strengths and weaknesses mentioned for each products. Products have been scored at the scale of 5 (5 being the highest)
Weightage
|
MicroStrategy
|
IBM Cognos
|
Tableau
|
Information Builders
|
SAP Business Object
| |
Mobile BI
|
10
|
5
|
1
|
2
|
4
|
3
|
Data integration
|
20
|
5
|
1
|
4
|
2
|
3
|
Metadata management
|
15
|
5
|
4
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
Dashboard, reporting & Online analytical processing (OLAP)
|
25
|
4
|
3
|
5
|
2
|
1
|
Ease of Use
|
10
|
3
|
2
|
5
|
1
|
4
|
Value
|
20
|
4
|
2
|
3
|
5
|
1
|
Total
|
100
|
4.35
|
2.25
|
3.5
|
2.7
|
2.2
|
Rank
|
1
|
4
|
2
|
3
|
5
|
Summary:
Microstrategy leads in almost every criteria and for this reason is ranked number 1.
Tableau ranks 2nd and lacks mostly because its focus is more on simplicity rather than proving itself as an enterprise standard product. However it really lacks in metadata management and does not provide production reporting. It is still the best option for small business owing to its speed, ease of use and low cost.
Information Builder comes out as one of the leaders in Mobile BI and cost-benefit analysis. However its complex scripted user interface, and less adaptive reporting, analytical and data integration capabilities make it good fit for requirements where minimal reporting features are required. Overall considering its value for money makes it ranks 3rd in the list
IBM Cognos provides strong dashboard & reporting functionality and metadata management, however it can really improve on rest of the parameters, specially its complex usability. It also has high cost associated with its use. Thus it ranks 4th.
SAP BusinessObjects’ key features are its ease of use, data integration and new metadata management module. It falls short on customer expectation in the value it provides, due to poor analytical capabilities and not so cheap software, and thus it ranks 5 in this comparison.
References:
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