Business Intelligence (BI)

Businesses across a variety of industries continue to embrace new technologies and solutions to increase productivity and efficiency. In recent years, Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics have vastly impacted how companies operate daily.

BI technology serves to improve productivity and efficiency rather than replace the employees who do these tasks already. With data becoming increasingly abundant, it is crucial that you have the right tools and the right support to help you remain competitive. Our on-site experts and tech consultants at Stratosphere Networks are equipped with the skills and knowledge to help make this process as easy and as seamless as possible. We can provide advice and resources to help your business get the most out of BI tools to improve productivity.

BI Defined

Business intelligence is a concept that encompasses technologies and applications that are used to collect and analyze data pertinent to business operations as well as facilitate better business decision-making.

Benefits of BI

• Speeding Up and Improving Decision-Making. With business intelligence tools, businesses are more capable of making sound decisions based on data and analytics. Additionally, applications that have data tracking features make it easier to pull the data you need and in less time.
• Identify New Revenue Opportunities. BI tools give businesses the ability to gain insight on potential opportunities for growth through data and analytic tools that otherwise, might be overlooked.
• Improve Efficiency. BI intelligence solutions save business owners and employees a lot of time with insight tools that can pull data and load in seconds - providing teams with an abundance of data that they can utilize to make the best decisions for their business.
• Identify Market Trends. BI solutions, in addition to providing business analytics, can also provide companies with real-time market trends. This way, businesses can stay on top of what's taking place within the market and their respective industry.

BI Tools

There is a wide range of business intelligence tools and concepts that our expert consultants at Stratosphere can get you familiar with. BI tools are a combination of data analysis applications and business reporting tools but over time, they've evolved to include an assortment of functionalities:

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). OLAP allows a user to extract and filter certain pieces of data from different points of view such as a marketer wanting to look at sales of a specific product from a specific month. Businesses can then use these pieces of data, compare it with another time-period or product and make marketing decisions based on differences in revenue.

Examples:

• IBM Cognos
• Micro Strategy
• Palo OLAP Server
• Apache Kylin icCube
• OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition)

Cloud-based/Software as a Service (SaaS) BI. Cloud BI applications are hosted and stored on a virtual network (i.e., the internet) or are deployed outside of a company's firewall. These types of BI tools are most commonly utilized to store dashboards, key performance indicators, and other analytic information.

Popular Cloud BI Solutions:

• Sisense
• IBM Cognos
• Microsoft Power BI Pro
• Domo
• Yellowfin

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL). ETL is a type of data integration process that is most commonly used to build a data warehouse. Data is initially taken from a source system, converted into format that can be analyzed by a user(s), and is then stored onto a data warehouse. ETL tools fall under categories such as: incumbent batch, cloud native, open-source, and real-time.

Popular ETL Solutions:

• IBM InfoSphere Information Server
• Microsoft SQL Server Integrated Services (SSIS)
• Oracle Data Integrator
• Alooma
• Talend
• Fivetran
• Matillion
• Apache Airflow

Dashboards & Visualizations. Dashboards serve as a place where charts, graphs, and other types of visual presentations are extracted and stored. Businesses can use these visual aids to better understand KPIs and business performance.

Popular Dashboard BI Solutions:

• Zoho Reports
• Sisense
• Domo
• Microsoft Power BI
• Tableau Desktop
• Google Analytics
• SAP Analytics Cloud
• Salesforce Einstein Analytics Platform

Data Mining. Data mining is the concept of finding and identifying patterns within large sets of data to predict future outcomes. Businesses can utilize BI data mining tools to predict revenues and make decisions to increase ROI and achieve financial goals.

Popular Data Mining Solutions:

• Rapid Miner
• Orange
• SiSense
• SPSS from IBM
• Oracle Data Mining

At Stratosphere Networks, our team of senior trusted advisors are knowledgeable about various BI solutions from suppliers in our partner network and can give you an unbiased opinion on which solutions are best suited for your business and budget.