What are the leading reporting and business intelligence tools for SMBs?

PowerPlan, US company, develops and markets a business performance management (BPM) solution that provides powerful budgeting, in-depth analysis, and flexible reporting features that replace spreadsheets and cumbersome, error-prone tools.

But are these really leading tools. I've never heard of them. I would have thought analysis services, BOBJ's reporting, Jasper, etc. would be more prominent solutions.

Michael,

Lots of tools can be described as leading, in their field. For example, Jaspersoft are indeed somewhere near the front of the pack of user friendly players in the on-premise solutions, but they come with huge lead times and set up costs.

When it comes to acquiring business intelligence capabilities, many SMBs have traditionally been at a disadvantage. They often cannot justify the large CapEx demanded of them, 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 changed and evolved far faster than software could be developed and installed.

This is why Software as a Service BI is growing so rapidly. SaaS application have no upfront costs, are maintained by the vendor, are very easily scalable and are bought and sold only on the end user experience, so are very intuitive. SaaS Bi products such as Bime are developed for SMBs so while they are not as famous as the SAPs or Microsofts of this world, they are market leading.

Smaller businesses may have smaller budgets, but they have no smaller need for quality business intelligence. There are ways to get a great deal of intelligence without the expense of traditional BI systems. Datawatch's Monarch technology is a leading BI tool for SMBs because it empowers business users – not just trained analysts or technical staff – with easy self service access to valuable data buried in reports and documents. Monarch allows end users to extract data from existing reports output by any information system for easy data analysis and export to Excel without programming or help from IT. The technology is used by everyone from small business owners to the Fortune 100, but the inexpensive, easy-to-install, easy-to-use nature of the product is especially important for smaller organizations.