5 min
In this day and year, it has become crucial for businesses to take help of data analytics to extract insights from big data. This helps businesses in identifying risks, customer behaviour and giving insights about what is happening in and around them. That is why business intelligence tools play a very vital role in making real-time strategic decisions in a business, no matter what its size it is.
Nic Smith of Microsoft BI Solutions Marketing had said, “BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can take the right decisions”. To demonstrate the same, here are some of the top BI tools used by businesses:
1. SAS: SAS is a major tool in business making connections between data and the business customers which helps in forecasting. It is known for making a subset of data, combining it with other data, creating columns. It is a good tool for real-time analysis and has access to data in many formats like database files, SAS tables, Microsoft Excel tables.
2. Tableau: A very popular tool which does not require any software knowledge, the tool can import data and help with visualisation. There is also a mobile app so users can complete tasks from anywhere. Its simple ‘drag and drop’ intuitive interface makes it very easy to work with it. It connects to all kinds of data sources like MS Excel, data warehouses and offers a free version for Windows and Mac users with 10GB of storage. It is very good for users in need of cross-platform reports.
Coca-Cola adopted Tableau to carry out a real time data analysis. It consolidates the data from multiple sources and allows to comprehend the metrics, including the budget, delivery operations, and profitability in a matter of few clicks.
3. Microsoft Power BI: Power BI helps analyse the data and provide productive insights by converting data to interesting visuals after which business analysts take decisions for the business. It can be accessed from any device and has the largest number of customisable visualisations. With Power BI, data can be in all types of charts including Bubbles, Tadpole Spark Grids, Tornado Charts, Table Heatmaps and many more.
Using Power BI, Real Madrid built a platform-as-a-service solution based on Microsoft Cloud and Office 365. It includes a fan engagement platform, extended video platform, and consumer app, all of which provide telemetry data surfaced through Power BI.
4. Looker: Looker is used for performing real-time data access and make effective business decisions. Also available on the cloud and on-premises platform, it has a web-based interface that can be used to exploit the expertise of companies’ analytics teams. It lets users design visualisations using a single code. It can analyse both web-hosted and SQL data.
5. Sisense: It simplifies every step of the analytics process – from data preparation to making insights from complex data. From its core In-Chip technology to Sisense Labs, it is a one of the leading innovation in the business analytics market. It is designed for the use of people that have little or no prior experience with data crunching.
6. Qlik Sense: This platform comes with 3 main versions: Qlik Sense Desktop is a free Windows application to create personalised reports, Qlik Sense Enterprise for organisational purpose and Qlik Sense Cloud is a cloud-based app which uses in-memory indexing for maintaining data relationship.
With QlikView analysis, you can monitor tweet traffic, do a sentiment or public tone analysis from tweets. And therefore social media sites like Twitter are popular users of it.
7. Google Analytics: This platform of Google established after acquiring Urchin in 2005 makes it easy to distinguish between top-performing and worst-performing website content, based on the bounce rates measured for each. Google Analytics provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android Apps, known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps. 
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