Announcement of Business Intelligence Battle Royale II

Just under 2 weeks ago I published an article where I did a comparison of BI tools: Business Intelligence Battle Royale – Web Dashboards. The article became popular quite quickly and generated much more interest than I initially expected!

Because of this I have decided to extend my comparisons to other platforms and publish a part 2 article with the results of my research. This list of platforms contains the following (Subject to change):

• IBM Cognos Express
• Jaspersoft
• Pentaho
• SAP Business Objects Edge
• Tibco Spotfire
• OBIEE

For each of these platforms I will download a trial version (if available) and attempt to create the same dashboard as I did with the initial set of tools (visible below):

I will be keeping track of how long it takes me to complete the dashboard and get it into a decently presentable state.

Again I will judge the BI platforms on 3 main factors which are:

• Intuitiveness of the platform, how easy it is to pick up and begin creating dashboards
• Look and Feel of the visualisations
• Interesting features of the platform ***

*** Previously this was ‘Unique features’ but I decided to rename this as it will be much more difficult to get truly unique components across so many platforms. 

When can you expect the blog to be complete?

As I am reviewing a number of platforms it may take me some time before I can publish the article so to keep this blog active I may provide previews and snippets of my progress along the way (aswell as other blog topics of course).

That being said, I had just finished looking into IBM Cognos Express before beginning this article. I don’t believe I was able to draw out the full strength and potential of the platform due to its complexity but I did find a few cool and interesting things about it which I will share with you all in the final article.

I will be beginning on a new platform tomorrow morning but at this point in time i’m not sure which one it will be. I guess i’ll see how I feel in the morning!

Is there a platform which you’d like to suggest?

For those still reading this article – If there is a BI platform which you think should be on the list then please leave a comment directing the way to a trial version. I can’t guarantee I will include all suggestions into the study but will make an effort into looking into each one.

As a final note i’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time into reading the first article!

Please help me share it with people whom you think might be interested in reading it and also your opinions on my research is always welcome!

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