Business Intelligence Software Review Your company should know

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In September 2009, IBM published the results of their survey with the 2600 CIO from 78 different countries and 19 different industries. 83% of CIOs interviewed personally selected Business Intelligence and Analytics as their main priority for 2009 and 2010.

In the past 6 months, we tested several business intelligence (BI) solutions such as Cognos, iQ4bis, Business Objects, Qlikview, Micro Strategy and BDA. They vary much in function, price, necessary resources (external and internal), the target group, integration with data sources and more.

In addition to its own research, we interviewed more than 50 companies to get their input about the experience with BI solutions, they TCO (total cost of ownership) and their future plans with Analytics.

We found that large companies is less price-sensitive and still invest in an external consulting and add additional users for their BI systems. But most small and medium-sized companies, (most of them with $ 50 million to 500 million U.S. dollars annual turnover, the so-called SMEs or Small and Mid-Size Business) want to reduce their costs for application analysis and take ownership more by using the resources internally to build or expand the data warehouse and analysis applications.

Therefore, we concentrated our efforts in searching and examining applications of BI are cheap, feature rich and easy to implement with the resources in-house. We found one clear winner, a relatively new business intelligence software, called BDA which stands for Business-Data-Analysis. BDA offers a data warehouse based on Microsoft technology, SQL-Server (but works with all types of data sources like Oracle, IBM DB2, SQL-Server, Access and many more), reporting and analysis front-end and many pre-packaged business solutions such as Sales Analysis for JD Edwards, Sage, BPCS, SAP and more. The two features we most like is that the BDA offers an unlimited number of user front-end for reporting and analysis system and the fact that IT departments can take full ownership of BDA to build or extend applications.

Reference:
[1] Herbert Schoenek, http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Herbert_Schoenek