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September 14, 2023
Mile Zivkovic
The world as we know it runs on data. Everywhere you look, there is data. But what good is that data if you cannot gain insights from it?
This is where business intelligence comes in - gathering, analyzing and summarizing that data so that a company can make data-based decisions in real time. Business intelligence may sound very complex but data analytics is actually fairly simple.
For example, an airport needs ad hoc BI solution to determine how many planes are flying in at any given point in time and which one should land first.
The business intelligence landscape is booming, as each year brings in even more big data. Here are some of the top business intelligence companies you should know and follow - whether you’re looking to get educated or purchase a tool for data visualization.
Luzmo (formerly known as Cumul.io) is a software company that focuses on embedded analytics dashboards for SaaS products and web apps.
Business intelligence is all about data, but how do you go from data to insights? Luzmo helps you do just that. You can connect your product data with Luzmo and add an interactive dashboard to your SaaS product so you can give customers actionable insights.
For example, one of Luzmo’s customers, Sentiance, uses data from drivers who are in commute. It taps into their phones to see who is driving, what kind of distance they are keeping, what their habits are, and more.
Just having this data alone would be useful, but it gets even more exciting when it’s visualized in the form of a dashboard. Other service providers and companies can then use this data to guide their decision-making. Instead of numbers, businesses can look at beautiful visualizations like this:
On Luzmo’s blog, you can find a range of interesting topics on business intelligence. From tips on designing dashboards to different ways to use artificial intelligence in BI to case studies with customers from different industries - we have it all.
The best part about Luzmo is that it works for all types of users: teams with in-house developers, those working with outsourced contractors or those who want a drag-and-drop solution they can use on their own.
At Luzmo, we work with a variety of software businesses from different industries and business users: ecommerce (including headless commerce platforms), supply chain management, and many others.
If you’re looking to create your first dashboard today, for free - you can grab a free trial!
When thinking of business intelligence solutions and data automation in the enterprise sector, Tableau is the name that comes up by default. The end-to-end SaaS platform is highly flexible and comes with a wealth of different features for data analysis and visualization.
One thing that makes this app stand out is Tableau GPT, the AI solution that allows anyone to get data insights more quickly. Connect your data sources and use GPT to automate the tedious tasks and build your dashboards more quickly. Tableau promises that there are no security concerns about GPT leaking your data outside of the platform.
Just like its parent company Salesforce (headquartered in San Francisco), Tableau stays on the cutting edge of tech, so it’s worth following them to see where the industry is headed. If you’re thinking about purchasing though, the prices are not very startup-friendly, and you’ll get a better deal with some lesser-known tools.
Speaking of enterprise BI tools, the battle of Tableau and Power BI is similar to Coke vs. Pepsi - it just keeps going. For businesses looking for a centralized source of data they can use to make better business decisions, Microsoft’s Power BI is a pretty solid choice.
Like Tableau, this American company is also keeping up with the latest trend of allowing self-service business intelligence tools. Tableau has Tableau GPT and Power BI has an integration with Copilot, an artificial intelligence assistant that helps you make the most out of this business intelligence software.
You can use Copilot to ask questions about your data, automate tasks, get insights and predictive analytics from your data sets, and more.
With its budget for advancements in new tech, Power BI is one of the top software solutions to watch out for in the coming years.
Rubbing against the shoulders of giants such as PowerBi and Tableau, Sisense quickly broke through as a great data visualization company for a variety of industries. Whereas the former two have a broader BI offer, Sisense focuses on the visualization part of business analytics.
Hailing from New York, Sisense stands out with its variety of choices. You don’t have to be a data science expert to use it as there are three choices for implementing data visualization:
No matter how many data sources (e.g. from data warehouses) you have or what kind of software development team you (don’t) have, Sisense has a range of options for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
They focus on customers from the following industries: healthcare, ecommerce, customer service, retail, marketing, manufacturing, IT and finance (e.g., investment yield).
The beauty of business intelligence is that it allows companies across different industries to make better, data-driven decisions. Unlike previously mentioned businesses, Toast focuses on BI for the restaurant industry. They have a range of software and hardware solutions that help restaurant owners manage their facilities better.
With Toast, you get it all in one place: point of sale systems, payment processing and hardware. You can track a variety of different datasets in one place: how many people make orders, through which channels, who is serving them and how busy they are, how much money you’re making through different channels and more.
Even if you’re not in the restaurant industry, reading through the Toast blog and use cases is a great experience as you can reveal how data impacts the various business processes in a typical restaurant.
Like other cloud-based BI tools, Qlik was quick to make use of language learning models and artificial intelligence. They claim to combine machine learning and artificial intelligence to help business uses and analysts get to insights even more quickly.
Whether it’s exploring data sets or creating data visualizations, you can use their AI to get help with everything. They have something called NLG, or natural language generation (another name for natural language processing), which helps interpret and summarize charts and visualizations with the click of a button.
With their increased focus on conversational analytics, AI and automated insight generation, Qlik should be on your radar - even if you’re not considering becoming a customer.
Want to go from data to insights with ease? Domo is an analytics platform that helps you do just that. Calling themselves the “data experience platform”, Domo allows businesses to connect their data sources, analyze the data and then visualize it in the form of dashboards (embedded or standalone) and reports.
And just like its rivals, Domo is fully embracing artificial intelligence with the Domo AI Service Layer. It has a host of different high-tech features, and some of them are yet to come. For example, text-to-SQL, text generation and text summarization. This will make it easier for companies to do forecasting, streamline their workflows and in general, offer a self-service BI platform to their end customer.
Having said all of that, Domo is looking well into the future with their business intelligence services, so they’re definitely a company to watch out for.
This Looker competitor decided that the old way of handling business intelligence operations no longer cuts it. They state that poor usability is the Achilles’ heel of BI and that every user is expected to be a data analytics expert. With Omni, they want to change that narrative.
Launched in 2022, Omni is one of the newcomers in the BI world. Ease of use is the name of their game and after establishing a solid foundation with a data model, anyone can use Omni to get insights from data. You can pick from UI, SQL or a modeling layer to structure, visualize and interpret your data.
While still in its infancy, Omni is threatening to overtake competitors such as Looker. Despite their overwhelming capabilities, tools like Looker suffer from UX and UI issues that non-data folk can hardly overcome.
It seems like Looker gets such a bad rap that many companies are building their own faster, sleeker and more intuitive alternative. One such app is Lightdash, launched in 2021. They too scratched their own itch as they realized that most business intelligence tools have enterprise-focused interfaces. As they say, this slows down modern data analysts, who are more similar to developers with each passing year.
Unlike Omni, Lightdash has a specific use case - it is built for dbt. This is a data transformation tool in the ELT process and Lightdash helps analysts turn dbt projects into full stack BI solutions. The fact that the tool is built using open-source code makes it even more unique. So far, it seems to be finding its place in the crowded BI market.
Launched in 2016, Virtualitics is a bit more seasoned compared to the last two entries. With cofounders coming from data analytics and astronomy backgrounds, the app was deemed for success from the start. Their goal? To allow businesses to unearth hidden gems in data that the typical BI tools were unable to find.
Using a mix of BI and AI, Virtualitics allows businesses to take their data and ask questions in plain English about how to interpret it. You can use 3D visualizations and AI to ask Virtualitics to show you e.g. what the most used feature in your product was in the past quarter and which group of users were the most active.
The business intelligence arena is getting more competitive with each passing year. As businesses look into data intelligence, data mining, analysis, discovery and visualization to make more informed decisions, even small businesses will start looking into purchasing a business intelligence platform. Staying informed and in the loop is a smart move for tech-savvy companies looking into the future.
And if you want to stay one step ahead of the competition, why not start today with Luzmo? You can create your very first analytics dashboard today, entirely for free and in just a few hours. Sign up for free and get started!
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
