Online education portals like Udacity and Coursera are really changing the world of remote learning in significant ways. By making free and high quality education accessible to a global audience, these platforms are opening up undreamt of possibilities for communities around the world to improve, grow, and prosper in the digital economy of the 21st century. Education at top tier colleges and universities has traditionally been a social and economic privilege, but now anyone can join in the learning revolution by sitting in virtual classrooms with the world’s best and brightest educators. Whether this involves learning how to code and build smart phone apps, or starting up a new business, or learning about public health literacy, the sky is the limit of what’s now possible.

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BI tools every small business should know about

by | Jun 10, 2014

Business Intelligence encompasses a wide range of best practices, architectures, and technologies that allow firms to gather their existing data into meaningful and useful information. This information can be readily used to support business decision-making in such areas as sales, finance, marketing, and HR. Business intelligence (BI) and related tools have been around for years but the growing ascendancy of Big Data in more recent times has placed a new onus on the importance of BI and related tools. BI tools have traditionally been targeted to larger enterprises, but now cheaper deployment models have made it easier for smaller businesses to participate and leverage these tools in a cost effective and efficient manner.

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Within the ranks of business intelligence there are also significant changes happening as the nexus of forces between cloud, mobile, information continue to transform how BI platforms and services are delivered. The most noteworthy trends in BI for 2014 are in the area of visual data discovery, cloud computing, and mobile.

In the following we’ll take a brief look at some of the best BI tools on the market; they’re distinguised as simple, elegant, and unified BI solutions fitted with the latest cutting-edge technologies.

Tableau: Tableau is a data visualization suite of tools, developed at Stanford in 2003, which is comprised of five primary offerings: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online, Tableau Reader and Tableau Public. As one of the more popular offerings in the BI market, Tableau has provided actionable, insightful, and easy ways to help people see and visualize their data. Tableau offers a free, cloud-based public version of its software especially suited for businesses in need of a low-cost solution for their data visualization needs.

Birst: Birst is a cloud-based platform for business intelligence and analytics, which is described as an “enterprise-caliber BI platform born in the cloud.” Birst comes in two versions: Discovery and Enterprise. The Discovery version provides ad hoc analytics, dashboards, and mobile analytics. The Enterprise version has these features plus data warehousing, data mashups, and dimensional database management. Birst works from mobile devices, such as iPad and iPhone, and also integrates with existing systems, such as Salesforce or SAP.

GoodData: GoodData is a cloud-based business intelligence solution that recently announced a rebranding of its platform to the “Open Analytics Platform”; this new iteration is described as a “complete data governance and discovery platform-as-a-service”. Through this new offering, GoodData offers an open, scalable, and flexible way to help customers make analytics a central part of their business. GoodData’s cloud solution offers real-time in memory analytics that can process data updates in real-time; it’s also open and extensible, which allows data collection from third-party tools and APIs.

LogiAnalytics: LogiAnalytics is a web-based BI reporting and analysis products that offers smaller IT departments a simple and fast way to deliver clear and compelling dashboards, reports, and analytics to their business users. The main advantage of LogiAnalytics is that it provides a straightforward, lost cost way, and easy way for customers to quickly create and deliver interactive dashboards and reports to any platform or mobile device. The platform is designed with rich features in mind, but can be used by anyone no matter how non-technical.

QlikView: QlikView is a BI platform that has garnered lots of attention in recent years for providing users with a clean, simple, and elegant means to analyze their data. Qlikview emphasizes ease of use over complexity. As one review says, “Taking just minutes to learn, the automatic associations of QlikView create endless possibilities for making ad hoc queries without requiring tediously defined structures and hierarchies, as is typical in other data analysis tools.” The bottom line is that QlikView offers an agile, quick, and cost effective way for businesses of all sizes to drive innovative decision-making forward.

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About Jeffrey Walker

Jeff is a business development consultant who specializes in helping businesses grow through technology innovations and solutions. He holds multiple master’s degrees from institutions such as Andrews University and Columbia University, and leverages this background towards empowering people in today’s digital world. He currently works as a research specialist for a Fortune 100 firm in Boston. When not writing on the latest technology trends, Jeff runs a robotics startup called virtupresence.com, along with oversight and leadership of startuplabs.co - an emerging market assistance company that helps businesses grow through innovation.