How to Choose Your Perfect BI Reporting Tool

Posted by Spiralogics Inc on April 9th, 2019

The quest for the right data management solution is something that continues to take up time for most businesses. Although, there is no dearth of BI reporting tools in the market, choosing that perfect tool for your business requires time and effort. If you choose a tool hastily, the results will be less than desirable as moving on to a new tool after that will require even more effort and time. To save you this headache and loss of time and money, let us show you how to evaluate and choose the right BI Reporting tool.  
 
Understand your Analytics:
When people talk about analytics, it is important to keep in mind that analytics can be of different kinds. Some of them are Predictive Analytics, Social Media Analytics, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Analytics, Real-Time Analytics and Mobile Analytics.
The above represent some of the most common kinds of analytics and depending on the needs of your business - the sector you belong to, the focus of your business and the specific issues related to your business – you’ll have to choose your analytics tool.  
 
On Premise or Cloud:
Once the nature of your business is clear to you with its environment and users, you should decided whether you want to set up BI tools on the cloud or on-premise BI reporting tools. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.  
Cloud BI reporting tools require minimal time to be set up and cost less as the environment and maintenance costs are shared. On-premise BI tools take more time to be set up, they also take more time to give out the reports and the cost of keeping the setup running and maintenance is much more than a cloud setup but the biggest positive is that the data and security are completely within your control.

 
Budget:
There are different BI reporting tools in the market that fit into different budgets. According to your budget you can choose from the different tools which are available in the commercial as well as open source market. Some of the commercial ones are IBM Cognos, Microstrategy and Qlik View while some of the open-source ones are Jasper Report, Birst and Pentaho.  
Size of data and number of users:
It is important to have an idea about the data requirements and the projected growth of your customer base so that you can choose a tool based on performance and scalability.  
 
Ease of use:
The flashiest tools with the most attractive reports in the world are going to be of no use if they do not make any sense to the end user. The end user should not find it difficult to use the BI tool and so ideally it is a good idea to involve the end user in the tool selection process.  
 
Customer Support:
Developers work across time zones so it is of utmost importance to have a customer support team that is available 24/7 along with good documentation and strong knowledge base. One more thing to keep in mind is the post sales product support.  
 
Selecting the appropriate tool for your business will help you avoid lot of pain in the long -term. Put it some time and effort and keep the above considerations in mind when selecting your BI reporting tools.