InetSoft Product Information: An Alternative to Cognos BI Reporting
Would you be interested in an alternative to Cognos' BI reporting? Enterprises have chosen InetSoft over Cognos for an easier to deploy and easier to use BI solution. View a demo and read customer reviews under the Evaluate menu option above, or read articles below about business intelligence.
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Visual BI Solution - Looking for visual BI solutions? InetSoft is a pioneer in self-service business intelligence software and makes it easy to create visual BI analyics. View a demo and try interactive examples...
Web-Based BI - The accelerated growth in the use and ease-of-use of BI tools has created the need for a way to make BI more accessible to users across an organization. InetSoft has answered that need perfectly with Style Intelligence, a secure, web-based BI platform which can be accessed by anyone with a web browser. This highly intuitive, mobile-friendly software consolidates an entire organization's data into a single source of information that can be accessed in the office or out in the field, making it easier to share and analyze actionable findings on a larger scale...
Web-Based Business Intelligence - Web-based business intelligence offers several large advantages over its desktop-based or fat-client counterparts. The standardization of the World Wide Web across all organizations and the centralization of software platforms heighten the benefits of Web-based applications to IT departments...
What Are All the Cost Items to Include in a Total Cost of Ownership Analysis for a BI Solution? - Software Costs: License Fees: Upfront costs associated with purchasing BI software licenses. Subscription Fees: Ongoing subscription costs for cloud-based BI solutions. Hardware Costs: Servers and Storage: The cost of physical or virtual servers and storage infrastructure required to host the BI solution. Networking Equipment: Costs for routers, switches, and other networking hardware. Implementation and Deployment Costs: Consulting Services: Fees for external consultants or implementation partners. Training: Costs for training internal staff on using and managing the BI solution. Customization and Integration: Custom Development: Costs associated with developing custom features or reports. Integration Costs: Expenses related to integrating the BI solution with other systems...
What Are Best Practices for Evaluating Enterprise Software? - Evaluating enterprise software is a critical process that requires careful consideration of various factors to ensure that the chosen solution aligns with the organization's needs, objectives, and strategic priorities. Here are some best practices for evaluating enterprise software effectively: Define Requirements and Objectives: Start by clearly defining the organization's requirements, objectives, and desired outcomes for the software solution. Consider factors such as functionality, scalability, integration capabilities, user experience, compliance requirements, and budget constraints. Involve Stakeholders: Engage key stakeholders from across the organization, including business users, IT professionals, department heads, and senior management, in the evaluation process. Gather input from different perspectives to ensure that the software meets the needs of all relevant stakeholders. Research and Benchmark: Conduct thorough research to identify potential software solutions that meet the defined requirements. Evaluate vendor reputation, industry recognition, customer reviews, and analyst reports to benchmark software offerings against each other...
What Are Some Best Practices for Solution Providers to Follow When Embedding BI? - Embedding Business Intelligence (BI) into solutions requires careful planning and execution to ensure seamless integration and optimal user experience. Here are some best practices for solution providers when embedding BI: Understand End-User Needs: User Persona Analysis: Conduct a thorough analysis of end-user personas to understand their specific needs, preferences, and skill levels. Feedback Loops: Establish mechanisms for collecting and incorporating user feedback throughout the development and integration process. Prioritize User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX): Intuitive Design: Create a user-friendly and intuitive interface that allows users to easily navigate and interact with BI features. Consistent Design Language: Maintain consistency in design elements and user interactions across the embedded BI solution and the host application. Ensure Seamless Integration: APIs and SDKs: Provide well-documented and robust APIs and SDKs to facilitate smooth integration with the host application. Compatibility Testing: Rigorously test the embedded BI solution across different environments and versions to ensure compatibility. Focus on Performance Optimization: Data Processing Efficiency: Optimize data processing and retrieval to ensure fast and responsive BI performance. Caching Mechanisms: Implement effective caching mechanisms to enhance performance and reduce the load on underlying data sources...
What Does a Cloud Developer Need in an API for Creating BI Dashboards? - A cloud developer building dashboards typically requires a robust API (Application Programming Interface) to facilitate the creation and management of these visual interfaces. Here are some key features and functionalities that a cloud developer might look for in an API for creating dashboards: Data Integration and Connectivity Ability to connect to various data sources, including databases, cloud storage, APIs, and other data services. Support for real-time data streaming or batch processing to keep the dashboard updated with the latest information. Data Transformation and Querying Tools for data cleaning, transformation, and aggregation to prepare it for visualization. A querying language or interface for extracting specific subsets of data from the source. Visualization Components A wide range of customizable charts, graphs, tables, and other visualization elements to represent the data effectively. Support for different chart types (e.g., bar charts, line charts, pie charts, heatmaps) and interactive features (e.g., tooltips, drill-downs)...
What Hinders the Success of BI Initiatives - The fourth sign that you don’t have a BI strategy is if your BI team, if you have a BI team, if they can't articulate what the business strategy is. It's a sure sign that you don’t have a business intelligence strategy because the business intelligence strategy should be directly tied to what your organization’s strategy is. And finally, there should be metrics around your BI strategy that align with your organization’s strategy. On another level...
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What Is Agile BI? - Agile Business Intelligence (BI) is a methodology that combines the principles of Agile software development with the needs of business intelligence and data analytics. The goal of Agile BI is to deliver high-quality, actionable insights to business users in a timely and efficient manner. One of the key principles of Agile BI is the use of iterative and incremental development. This means that the development process is broken down into small chunks, called sprints, which typically last between one and four weeks. During each sprint, a team works to deliver a working prototype of the BI solution. This approach allows for rapid delivery of working software, which can then be tested and refined based on user feedback. Another important aspect of Agile BI is the use of cross-functional teams. In an Agile BI team, all members are responsible for the success of the project, and each team member brings their own unique skills and expertise to the table. This helps to ensure that all necessary skills are represented on the team, and that the team can work together effectively to deliver a high-quality solution...
What Is Agile BI Development - Today we are talking about agile business intelligence development - which has become an industry buzzword nowadays. So sure, you can discount the term a little bit as marketing hype, but let’s focus on what’s useful about the term and the mission it conveys. Agile BI is seeking to overcome the traditional BI solution challenges or obstacles. There are three categories of these commonly perceived constraints. Indeed BI solutions have been around for quite a while. Some of those solutions are 10-20 years old, and they’ve become very complex. That’s partly because they have been built via multiple acquisitions which result in a bunch of loosely-couple products that were developed independently. So it can be very complicated to understand the solutions and deploy them, to figure out which BI application you need, and so on. The bottom line for enterprises trying to implement business intelligence is that the implementation becomes a lengthy, painful process. It takes a long time to iterate around a repetitive process to get to the ultimate state of successful deployment...
What Is a BI Platform with a Data Mashup Engine? - A Business Intelligence (BI) platform with a Data Mashup Engine is a software solution that combines the capabilities of BI tools with advanced data integration and transformation features. It allows users to blend, merge, and transform data from various sources for the purpose of analysis and reporting. Here's a detailed breakdown of the key components: Business Intelligence Platform: A BI platform provides tools and infrastructure for data analysis, visualization, and reporting. It enables users to create dashboards, generate reports, and gain insights from data. Data Mashup Engine: A Data Mashup Engine is a specialized component within a BI platform that facilitates the process of combining data from multiple sources. It includes features for data integration, transformation, and blending. Key Features of a Data Mashup Engine: Data Integration: Allows for the extraction of data from various sources, which can include databases, spreadsheets, web services, and other structured and...
What is a BICC? - Now it’s also important to understand what the BICC is made up of. This is not just an IT group. From a terminology perspective I distinguish between BICC and a COE or center of excellence by the focus as far as the expansion. COE could be an IT organization that is a center of excellence that runs a shared service that different lines of business will access in order to get their reports or to get their information or to run their applications. When I talk about BICC, it’s more of an infrastructure from an organization and skills perspective. So you have the IT skills that they understand the administration, the security, the governance of data, and they also manage the tools and the systems. But you also need analytical skills from a business perspective, for instance people who understand data how to slice and dice it, how to do statistical analysis and how to tie that into what the particular business needs are. And business skills are very, very important as well. You need to make sure that you have the business involved in this organization as a member because they understand what the business requirements are, they understand how the business operates, they understand how this information is used and how these tools are used based on the abilities and the capabilities of their users...
What Is Elastic BI? - Elastic BI (Elastic Business Intelligence) refers to the ability of a BI system to dynamically scale its resources based on fluctuating data processing needs. This involves automatically adjusting compute, storage, and query processing power to handle varying workloads efficiently, without manual intervention. The concept of elasticity is borrowed from cloud computing, where resources can be rapidly provisioned or de-provisioned to meet demand. In the context of Business Intelligence, Elastic BI allows businesses to manage large, unpredictable, or growing volumes of data while maintaining high performance, reducing costs, and ensuring accessibility to insights. It's particularly relevant for organizations leveraging cloud-based BI solutions or hybrid cloud architectures...
What Is Pervasive BI? - It’s the ability to deliver integrated, right-time data warehousing information to all users including front-line employees, suppliers, customers, and partners. It provides an enterprise visibility, insight and facts to make smarter decisions in all processes at all times. In most companies, this means liberating existing infrastructure by connecting it to multiple operational business processes. It certainly simplifies and it makes it more possible to become pervasive. InetSoft's unique data mashup engine allows combinations of almost any data source into a common BI infrastructure so you can make dashboards and reports that previously had to be done manually in a spreadsheet, for instance. In the traditional approach data environments were highly fragmented. It was very difficult to move to an enterprise-wide model. Adding the operational integration in addition to integrating data enterprise wide was considered not feasible until recently. This is where we felt it would by highly valuable to describe the new information supply chain environment and pervasive BI strategy...
What to Look for in a BI Platform - Are there specific features or capabilities that companies should look for in a BI platform? Are there certain technological aspects or road map questions that organizations should be asking vendors that they’re evaluating? Absolutely, one of the keys to a successful BI implementation is integration. And out of the many layers of business intelligence architecture, what we call the BI stack, the most important layer in my mind is meta data because ultimately you can actually utilize data integration from one vendor, data modeling tools from a second vendor and presentation from a third vendor as long as all of them are tied with either the same or an integrated meta data architecture. And as long as I can change a business rule or a name of an entity only in one place, and as long as I trace my data linage from a report that I see on my screen all the way back to the source system, which is what meta data does, that is really the key...
What Makes InetSoft a Good Alternative to a BI DW Solution? - InetSoft offers a compelling alternative to traditional Business Intelligence (BI) Data Warehouse (DW) solutions for several reasons: Agility and Flexibility: InetSoft's BI platform provides agile and flexible data analysis capabilities, allowing users to quickly access, visualize, and analyze data from multiple sources without the need for complex data modeling or ETL processes. Unlike traditional BI DW solutions that require extensive upfront planning and data modeling, InetSoft enables users to dynamically connect to data sources, explore data relationships, and create ad-hoc reports and dashboards on-the-fly. Ease of Implementation: InetSoft's BI platform offers a user-friendly interface and intuitive tools for data visualization, report design, and dashboard creation, making it easy for business users and analysts to get started without extensive training or IT support. Traditional BI DW solutions often require significant IT involvement for data modeling, schema design, and ETL development, leading to longer implementation timelines and higher implementation costs. Scalability and Performance: InetSoft's BI platform is designed for scalability and performance, enabling organizations to analyze large volumes of data in real-time and support growing user populations and data sources. Unlike traditional BI DW solutions that may encounter performance bottlenecks or scalability limitations as data volumes increase, InetSoft's architecture is optimized for high performance and scalability...
Which BI Tool for Informatica? - Looking for a good BI tool for Informatica? InetSoft's pioneering dashboard reporting application makes producing great-looking web-based reports and dashboards easy with a drag-and-drop designer and the ability to connect to all your data sources. Maximize self-service for all types of users. View a demo and try interactive examples...
Why Are BI Applications Still So Complex? - Well, the crux of the matter is that there is a big difference between data and information. Take for example the banking crisis, why could banks not foresee the crisis? They had all the data, but not the information. That’s precisely what business intelligence and analytics are all about. It is about translating that raw and meaningless data, those bits and bytes that you can’t really make sense by looking at them in raw form. You need to translate data into meaningful, insightful, useful information that can help you make the decisions using BI. One of the problems with traditional BI implementations is that there are just so many BI tools to choose from. I am just showing a few here, but if we really decompose this to the lowest level of detail, we will typically count upwards of 40 different components all the way from the data sourcing kind of on the one side all the way to data information delivery, let’s say via portals or emails or alerts...
Why Mobile BI Is Such a Hot Trend - Today, we are going to discuss a new trend that we have been seeing on the market in the last few years, tablets and mobile BI. A lot of analysts predict that mobile market is going to grow exponentially in the near future, and a lot of CEOs and CIOs are starting to wonder how to leverage this trend in different areas, in BI analytics in particular. I would like to begin our presentation with some data. As most of you probably know tablet computers are now a main component of the mobile computing market and their impact will continue to expand in the coming years. According to a research report that I found published earlier this year, five years from now by 2011, the number of tablet PCs is expected to increase from 16 million to 147 million. So in just five years, it will multiply by almost 10 times. And based on the same report, tablet adoption is occurring at even faster pace than the historic rates that are set by devices such as smart phones, computers, and mp3 players, game consoles and DVD players...