What most BI Vendors don't want you to know
A lot of people tend to misuse the term "BI", and even the industry itself has developed a common meaning for the term which is a bit of a misnomer. Traditionally BI has referred mostly to the front-end -- and I think most people when they talk about it would generally think about BI as the front-end.
Many prefer the broader term Business Analytics, because it's a lot more than just BI or presentation layer. The implication is that you're going to have to be moving data from possibly multiple raw operational sources in order to create higher quality business information on the other side - and to accomplish that, there's a little more to it than just front-end work.
So for anyone evaluating a "BI" vendor or rather a Business Analytics vendor, its more about what that vendor can actually do with the data-sets that they're presented with - because there really are a couple of distinct strategies that more specialized Business Analytics vendors can take to provide quick workable solutions - efficiently and inexpensively.
For instance, if you're integrating data from applications like NetSuite, Salesforce or homegrown applications, you have data in its raw natural state which is not something that you can just drop into a visualization tool like a MicroStrategy or Tableau and make sense of it. In most cases transformation and manipulation are required - so the real challenge becomes: How do I automate the whole process?
read more on the SQL Power blog
