A 2020-21 Guide to SaaS BI—Paving ways for Strategic Intelligence to Do Business
Businesses, all over, have finally realized the productive impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve the puzzling mysteries for gaining business opportunities and retaining customers.
As much as the world is acknowledging the importance of data
and data-related innovations, the more the significance of the use of Business
Intelligence—BI and Business Analytics powered by AI is getting underlined.
In this write-up, we will attempt to understand the core
ideas of SaaS BI, its advantages and challenges, and what are the top SaaS BI
tools for 2020-2021.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a combination of strategies,
technologies, applications, and processes used by organizations to analyze the
data for business information. BI tools are used to transforms the data into
actionable insights that help in devising an organization’s strategy and taking
crucial planning and development decisions.
BI can process a large amount of structured as well as unstructured data to develop, identify, track, monitor, or report the strategic business opportunities. The BI tools access and analyze the data sets as well as visualize the analytical findings based on data;
- Reports
- Dashboards
- Summaries
- Graphs
- Charts
- Maps
- Others
What is SaaS BI?
SaaS BI comprises of two acronyms:
SaaS and BI.
SaaS is the Software-as-a-Service, whereas BI is Business
Intelligence.
So, SaaS BI is any cloud-based Business Intelligence
application that delivers BI tools like the dashboard, analytics, reports,
summary, etc. over the recurring or subscription basis.
SaaS BI is one of the most important tools for any
enterprise. SaaS BI is increasingly becoming the part of applications use to
manage multiple standard business processes and operations such as Sales,
Marketing, Support, HR, Finance, Accounting, Billing, Inventory, or Supply
Chain Management.
SaaS BI analyzes the structured as well as unstructured data
sets from CRM, Sales, Marketing, Accounting, and other stacks that presents the
information as visual analytics. These insightful analytical findings can be
used to create reports, dashboards, business strategies, and data-driven business
development decisions from anywhere, anytime.
The Core Functions of SaaS Business Intelligence
Bu combining the business analytics,
data mining and visualization, and other data tools and infrastructure, BI
helps organizations to make authenticated and data-driven decisions.
Some of the most critical functions of the SaaS Business Intelligence includes;
- Data Preparation
- Reporting
- Querying
- Online Analytical Processing
- Descriptive Analytics
- Data Mining
- Process Mining
- Text Mining
- Complex Event Processing
- Benchmarking
- Statistical Analysis
- Predictive Analysis
- Perceptive Analysis
The Gains of SaaS Business Intelligence
SaaS BI is a new-age data-driven technology to access,
monitor, and analyze data in order to develop, identify, or drive statistically
data-driven analytical processes. SaaS BI shows present and historical data
within the business context to project future data sets or provide performance
and competitor benchmark.
In sales, marketing, support, and customer relationship
management, SaaS BI enables teams and managers to quickly identify patterns,
describe trends, or predict behaviors. SaaS BI has empowered businesses, regardless
of their sizes, to effectively use data from all the sources and process it
through BI for enhanced business growth and increased sales and revenue.
SaaS BI is useful to find opportunities for profit, customer
behavior analysis, competitive data comparison, performance tracking of the internal
and external audience, operations optimization, predictive analysis, defining
market trends, and identification of risks, problems, sales drop, revenue
leakages, churn, or more issues.
SaaS Business Intelligence vs. SaaS Data Analytics
SaaS BI tools are a combination of Business Intelligence
(BI) and Data Analytics (DA).
Traditional Business Intelligence was focused on data
preparation, mining, benchmarking, descriptive analytics, and reporting. But,
with the rise of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing,
the predictive and prospective components of data analytics combined with
Business Intelligence gave rise to the modern BI.
Here, it is important to understand the difference between BI
and BA.
Business Intelligence analyzes data to identify and explain
what data reveals about the past deeds that are peddling the present state. On
the other hand, data analytics are predictive that enable organizations to
derive data-driven projection of sales numbers, revenue growth, customer
engagement, marketing or sales campaign performance, and more.
Data Analytics, also called Business Analytics, mines data,
predicts and prescribes the actionable insights to take optimized business
decisions or create business strategies.
The Best SaaS BI Tools for SMBs in 2020-2021
SaaS made BI available for any business irrelevant of the
size, resources, and budget to get rid of complicated spreadsheets that once
involved in a tireless and complex process to establish the statistical logic
in the data.
Today, the SaaS technology allows SMBs to get access to the BI tools on a recurring basis as per their usage needs. The10 best SaaS BI tools in 2020-21 are:
- Datapine
- Zoho Analytics
- HubSpot
- SAS
- IBM Cognos Analytics
- Oracle Netsuite
- Tableau
- Oracle Netsuite
- Xplenty
- YellowFin
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