An Overview Of BI And Popular BI Tools Comparison

An Overview of BI and Popular BI Tools Comparison

Target readers : All, especially BI professionals

Keywords
Business Intelligence, BI Tools, Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion, OBIEE, ETL, DW, Magic Quadrant

Introduction

BI is an evolving and widely popular field today, which is increasingly being embraced by various industries across
a wide spectrum.
This documents gives overview of Business Intelligence and insights into the various Business Intelligence tools
available in the market, which can be taken up by any organization for the purpose of Business Intelligence
analytics, hence enabling them take intelligent business decisions.

Reference(s):
http://www.businessintelligencesoftware.co/business-intelligence.html
http://www.comparebusinessproducts.com/business-intelligence-reporting-tools
http://business-intelligence-tools.entrepreneur.com/compare/82-139/Hyperion-vs-Cognos
http://www.gartner.com
http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/resources/analyst-reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-business-intelligence-bi-platform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence
Google web pages

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Contents

• What is Business Intelligence (BI) ?

• BI life cycle

• Why BI?

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

• Comparison between popular BI tools

• Industries Turning Towards BI

• How These Industries Benefit?

• Summarizing BI

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What is Business Intelligence (BI) ?

• The term BI was coined for the first time in 1958, by a person named Hans Peter Luhn.

• BI consists of various tools, technologies & methods with the help of which useless raw data can be transformed into a
useful and meaningful information for business purpose.

• BI can take care of huge data volumes for developing new opportunities.

• Utilizing these new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy can render a competitive edge to any
organization.

• BI presents business operations from past, present, and predictive views.

• BI enables reporting, analytics, data mining, process mining, Business Performance Management, and benchmarking.

• Terms Business Intelligence & Competitive Intelligence are sometimes used interchangeably. This is because they both
support decision making.

• However, the difference between them is that BI makes use of technologies & processes to analyze mostly internal &
structured data. Competitive Intelligence, on the other hand, collects, analyze & disseminates information with special
focus on competitors of the company.

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BI Life Cycle

Extract, Data Mart/ Business

Data
Transform, Data Intelligence Outputs
Sources
Load Warehouses Tools

Business Intelligence Life Cycle

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Why BI?

• In today’s cut throat competitive environment, there are many changes that keep occurring, for example say mergers,
acquisitions, policy regulations etc. BI helps an organization to envisage these changes and enable the organization to
tackle them.

• Helps organizations become efficient & respond to changes quickly.

• Business intelligence helps an organization do their business in an intelligent manner.

• Managing ever increasing, huge data volumes (both structured & unstructured).

• Business Intelligence helps in arresting delays in a process.

• Business Intelligence helps in radical transformation of existing business processes.

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 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

challengers leaders

Microsoft
Tableau
S/W IBM

Oracle
Information
LogiXML Builders
Ability to SAP Figure depicts how various vendors perform in a market
Birst
execute segment. This will help end users to make a intelligent
choice of their business partners.
Prognoz
Panorama
S/W

Targit Gooddata

Niche Visionaries
players
Completeness of
vision
Source: Gartner (February 2013)

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Comparison between popular BI tools

• For enhancing their BI capability, an organization can choose from a range of Business Intelligence tools available in
market

• Advent of Business Intelligence has made easy playing with huge data volumes. One can use BI for storage of data as
well as processing & analyzing of data, even when data size runs in TB’s PB’s.

• Some of the popular Business Intelligence tools available in market, from the house of various IT giants are namely:

• BO (Business Objects) by SAP

• COGNOS by IBM

• OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) by Oracle

• Hyperion by Oracle

• In today’s cut throat competitive era, an organization needs to make an intelligent choice for choosing their ‘Business
Intelligence’ service provider.

• Below comparison compares these tools on various important aspects.

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 Comparison Between Popular BI Tools
Option 1
Criteria
SAP-Business Objects
Reporting Features
Metadata Good - Presented as BO universe.
Defines metadata for business data Framework . Source data connection
and data source connection. Allows is managed with connection manager
rules & configurations for design,
performance and security
Fixed Good - Crystal Reports provides
reports additional capability to produce
(canned high quality formatted reports.
reports) Web Intelligence is also available
for web based reporting
Dynamic Good - Reporting is based on
reports metadata layer which can be built
on top of RDBMS or OLAP cube.
Supported by Web Intelligence
Cube based Medium to good - No separate
analytics OLAP engine. Voyager is used for
cube based analysis (SAP Net
weaver is good for OLAP but is not
a part of Business Objects suite)
Option 2
IBM-Cognos
Good - Presented as Cognos
Good - Report studio provides
standard formatting and charting
features
Good - Supported by Query Studio
Good - Provides two OLAP engines –
Cognos cubes and in-memory OLAP
engine. Analysis studio supports cube
based analysis
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Option 3
OBI (Oracle Business Option 4
Intelligence) Hyperion
Medium to Good – This can be Good – The Tool MDM handles the
handled through OBI Server Metadata Management.
Component.
Good –It has Complete BI Good –Hyperion Interactive reporting
functionality made on a unified handles this functionality.
infrastructure which includes financial
as well as enterprise reporting,
presentation & OLAP analysis and
presentation, and reporting on high-
volume production.
It allows highly interactive access to Enables user to modify filter
data which is actionable. Depending conditions, create reports and change
on an individuals role, data is also variables used for analysis
personalized
MOLAP cubes can be created in Essbase is the primary OLAP
Oracle OLAP analytic workspaces. database which follows a 3 tier
Oracle BI discoverer for OLAP can be architecture. Multidimensional cube
used to do analytical processing on for anytics or for data mining can be
MOLAP cubes. generated here
Also supports Hyperion Essbase
multidimensional structures
9

Option 1
Criteria
SAP-Business Objects
Reporting Features
Other Features Good - Allows hierarchy drill up,
drill down, drill through, slice-
dice, parameterized reports,
cascading prompts, LOV etc.
Dashboard, Scorecard are
supported but are licensed
separately
Architectural & Enterprise features
Integration Medium - Interoperability
between different reporting
modules may not be fully
possible. Portal integration and
Microsoft office integration is
supported
Web Services Supported
/SOA
Option 2
IBM-Cognos
Good - Hierarchy drill up, drill
down, drill through, slice-dice,
parameterized reports are
supported.
Scorecard feature is licensed
separately as metric studio
Good - All reporting modules are
well integrated and provides
common user interface. Portal
integration and Microsoft office
integration is supported
Supported
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Option 3
OBI (Oracle Business
Intelligence)
Good – Custom formulas, Display
features, Exceptions, Filters,
formatting and Hide/Show data
features are available.
Oracle BI Publisher can be deployed Hyperion System 9 BIPlus can be
on a J2EE application server.
Business Intelligence as a
Component of Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA), Would run a
BPEL process on Fusion
Middleware.
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Option 4
Hyperion
Good – Various analysis and display
features like Chart (Vertical Bar,
Horizontal Bar, Pie, Line etc), Pivots,
Graphs, Tables are available. Hyperlinks
can used to navigate user from one
section of report to another section or
to a different report all together.
Formulas can be written using simple
formula editor. Filters are available in
Hyperion Tools.
deployed on J2EE application server
which acts as a single repository for all
kind of reports generated from different
reporting tools.
Hyperion System 9 has a very strong
Service Oriented Architecture(SOA). The
SOA is implemented through 3 tier
architecture.

Option 1
Criteria
SAP-Business Objects
Architectural & Enterprise features
Perform-acne & Medium to good -
Scalability BusinessObjects Enterprise, is
based on SOA and allows flexible
and scalable server settings.
BusinessObjects Enterprise
provides internal clustering
features and manages and
controls requests from the client
internally.
BusinessObjects Enterprise is
designed to be used enterprise-
wide. The system can be scaled
up by adding servers or services.
Platform support Supported on latest version for
Windows, LINUX and Unix flavors
Option 2
IBM-Cognos
Medium - High volume of data may
increase the report generation time.
Report data caching is not
extensively used. No built in load
balancer. However it can be
integrated with 3rd party load
balancers.
Supported on latest version for
Windows, LINUX and Unix flavors
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Option 3
OBI (Oracle Business
Intelligence)
Good to Medium – Performance
logs can be viewed to assess the
performance. OBIEE is highly
scalable and can be scaled by
adding new servers
All Unix platforms, HP-UX, IBM AIX,
LINUX, Windows
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Option 4
Hyperion
Good – One of the fastest
aggregation tools available in the
market. Performance tuning options
available to fine tune the DB for
faster aggregation and retrieval of
data with reduced calculation times.
Hyperion is Easily and highly
scalable.
All Unix platforms, HP-UX, IBM AIX,
LINUX, Windows

Option 1
Criteria
SAP-Business Objects
Security Aspects & General Administration
Security Good - Provides horizontal and
vertical data security. Integrates
with 3rd party directory server.
Artifact and folder level security is
also provided.
BusinessObjects Enterprise,
manages most of the security in
the system and keeps the integrity
of security across products. Yes,
function level and cell level security
can be defined by Designer, our
metadata creation tool).Row Level
Security and group level security
can also be configured.
Application/ Good - user portal called InfoView
User manages reports by folders and
managemen categories. Not only reports can be
t saved and organized into the
desired folders, reports can be
categorized for ease of
management. InfoView also
provides search functions, allowing
the user to search reports by
keyword, title, report type and
modification time range.
Option 2
IBM-Cognos
Good - Provides horizontal and
vertical data security. Integrates with security is provided
3rd party directory server. Artifact and
folder level security is also provided.
Also provides -
Query item level (ReportNet),
category level (PowerPlay);supports
Row level security also and its multi
platform support.
Good - Available to store reports both
in share holder and personal holders
on a portal page of Cognos
Connection.
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Option 3
OBI (Oracle Business
Intelligence)
Good to Medium – Roles based
Oracle BI web services can be used to
extract results from Oracle BI
presentation services. Also Web
services can be used to execute
business intelligence alerts using Ibots
( Delivers).
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Option 4
Hyperion
Good – A detailed four layer security
architecture is in place which takes
care of any security issue. Hyperion
Shared Services previously known as
Hyperion Hub is a single point of
handling any security issue. The
Single Sign on concept is a very
useful feature to secure unauthorized
access to data.
All the reports developed are stored in
a central repository called Hyperion
System 9 BIPlus. This is a web portal,
any user provision in Shared Service
can access the portal over web and
reach to the reports. The reports can
then be saved locally. This also help in
curtaining any concurrency issue. A
very attractive feature called Smart
Cut is also available in Hyperion
System 9 BIPlus.

Option 1
Criteria
SAP-Business Objects
Security Aspects & General Administration
Scheduling, event Medium to Good - Standard
management provision for report scheduling
and event management
Migration Good - Migration tools are
available
Costs Assuming that BO is already
available, additional
licensing/support cost will be
low.
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Option 2
IBM-Cognos
Good - Standard provision for report There are different scheduler
scheduling and event management
Good - Migration tool available for
Cognos 7.x to Cognos 8.x migration
Licensing/support cost will be high
Option 3
Option 4
OBI (Oracle Business
Hyperion
Intelligence)
Good – The report can be scheduled
components available dependent on in form of Books, Batches and Jobs.
platform (Unix/Windows) The reports are then executed and
result is sent to the users in desired
file format via mail. The output is
also stored on workspace for future
references
Good – Supported Good – Supported
Effective if we have oracle suite as Effective when used via distribution
such with us. So that it can support channels like - Subscribe .Net™ and
in different points like customer Intraware, Inc
support, patches and other technical
support that is needed during
installation or maintenance will be
easy.
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 Industries Turning Towards BI

• Automobiles • Pharmaceuticals
• Aviation • Real Estate
• Banking • Retail
• Biotechnology
• Steel
• Cement
• Textiles
• Financial Services
• Telecommunications
• Food Industry
• Gems and Jewelry • Tourism & Hospitality

• Healthcare • Training & Education

• Oil & Gas

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How These Industries Benefit?

 Ease of Analyzing Huge Data Volumes, in a meaningful way.

 Deeper insights into business
 Informed decision making
 Market Trends for the industry concerned.
 Consumer behavior analysis.
 Analyzing sales trends.
 Analyzing profit trends.
 Improved customer service & satisfaction
 Real-time information that enhances productivity & operational efficiency
 Streamline budgeting & planning
 BI helps in identifying areas of potential opportunity.

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Summarizing BI

• Business Intelligence leads to intelligent business decisions.

• Data warehousing is the first step towards integrating the massive volume of data that an organization has. It provides
the organization with a memory which supports decision making.

• By making use of BI, companies get edge over their competitors.

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