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What are the best Business Intelligence products for SMBs?
I have a small advertising firm and I'm wondering if there is a BI solution that can support our small but busy organization? What are the best BI products for SMBs? Are there any that focus on the advertising industry specifically? Are web-based systems good options, or is this the type of software you'd want installed on your own servers?
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4 Answers
Hi John,
There are a lot more BI vendors for SMBs than there used to be, so it's a good time to be looking. Since you're a small advertising firm, I'm assuming that you don't have a large IT team and that your budget is limited. I'm also assuming that most of your people would prefer to focus on advertising than on building and maintaining a BI solution.
If that's the case, there are two types of BI that you should investigate first: SaaS BI and in-memory.
SaaS BI
Vendors include: Birst, PivotLink, GoodData, Business Objects OnDemand
SaaS BI is delivered as a service over the web, so upfront costs are lower, implementation times are faster, and ongoing maintenance requirements are few. Some vendors offer more robust BI platforms than others, and some are highly specialized to one type of analysis, such as sales analysis, so you need to know what your needs are.
I'm not aware of a SaaS BI provider that specializes solely in advertising operations, so some customization will probably be required. You should ask each of them about that.
In-memory analytics:
Vendors include: QlikTech
In-memory is good for groups and it runs off of your own computer. This is best for visualization of data that's already fairly organized. At smaller scale it's very affordable. At larger scale it starts rivaling the traditional on-premise providers in terms of cost and complexity. Doing this well also requires some knowledge of coding (although not a lot, and certainly not as much as on-premise BI). So it helps to have an IT team to back you up if you're choosing in-memory.
If my assumption is wrong and you *do* have a lot of BI expertise on staff, there are more options. These are tempting, because the initial price tag looks free. However, keep in mind that these options require a lot more in-house expertise to create and maintain the system.
Open Source BI
Vendor: Pentaho
Software is free but support is not, and you implement all of the components together and maintain it yourself.
On-premise BI
Vendor: Microsoft SSAS
Many small businesses start here, especially if you're a Microsoft shop and have an IT team to implement and maintain it. Features are limited and it's somewhat complex.
In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I work for Birst, a SaaS BI company (www.birst.com), so I'm partial to the SaaS option.
If you're interested in learning more about SaaS BI from an analyst firm, Aberdeen just came out with a report. If you use this link, you can get a free copy of it: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30411437&cid=6512
Good luck to you.
- Barbara
Birst
www.birst.com
Barbara -- awesome and very vendor neutral response! Thanks for pointing out all of those great options and breaking them our by delivery type.
For SMBs, SaaS is definitely the way to go, for several reasons.
1) Small and medium-sized businesses often cannot justify the large CapEx of traditional BI, do not have the IT resources to run an on premise database and server system and are not sure that they have the breadth or depth of data to warrant such a system. Often their needs change and evolve far faster than software can be developed and installed.
2) Traditional BI demands technical expertise both to manage and use. Business users could not quickly perform analysis themselves; queries had to be made through the IT department and often involved long delays. As there is no software to install, there is no daily maintenance or routine tasks to be done, so nothing to require extra IT hands or expertise. This frees IT professionals to concentrate on strategic IT and growing the business.
3) With traditional BI having enough data to justify the BI spend is certainly a problem. The huge upfront costs and time investment often cannot be justified by the need for a couple of key decision makers to analyse a small number of records. SaaS BI gets rid of this problem as it provides fully functional BI suite available for just one person. SaaS applications can be rapidly scaled up or down as your business needs change.
4) Most SaaS products are lightweight and designed to complement the investment in data storage and manipulation that you already have. For example, Bime, a SaaS BI solution, plugs directly in to online and traditional sources to extract data, then allows creation of visualizations and dashboards with a few clicks.
5) Access and sharing were the original drivers of the SaaS cloud computing model so applications make it easy to get useful visualizations to the right people quickly by inviting people to your dashboard's URL or embedding it in a website or blog.
BI products have traditionally required huge upfront costs, had long lead times and
demanded technical expertise to use. SaaS allows powerful functionality without the need for any of these, making it a highly profitable investment for most organizations.
Have you taken a look at GoodData (http://www.gooddata.com)? It is pretty slick (and quite easy to use) for building custom reports, dashboards, etc. It's 100% SaaS. I agree with Kirsty that SaaS is probably the way to go for SMBs.
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