Business Intelligence Software Companies

What is market intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) software, also called marketing intelligence, or business analytics tools, is any measurable business insights and metrics you can gather together to make better decision-making. A business intelligence solution is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that pulls together information from varying sources in order to give you an organized mix of both in-depth and high-level insights. A BI solution automates data consolidation and starts to automate reports to make sense of it all.

Who uses a business analytics tool? When it comes to major company decisions, the c-level execs are the ones that need BI to make decisions, most often the CIO. However, BI solutions dive into other areas like accounting, customer relations and sales, meaning that just about any team member could benefit from better analytics.

Why do you need a business intelligence solution?

Let's face it: Metrics rule our world. If you aren't making decisions based on quantitative analysis, you simply aren't making informed decisions. And when you are still tiny, you can do a mix of Google Analytics and totals at the bottom of spreadsheets and get a bit of insights. But once your business scales, and your data along with it, spreadsheets just become boxy mistakes. You need a BI solution to grow alongside your business and the big data it accumulates, and you need a BI dashboard to see your business at a quick glance. Finding the right data management solution is essential to your business' success.

In fact, MIT has found that high-performing organizations--45 percent of them--are more than twice as likely to use analytics to perform strategy than under-performing ones--only 20 percent of which track data.

Here are some more reasons you need a business software to manage your data, analytics and business intelligence:

1. Way too much data to fit into those Excel cells.
2. You don't have time to analyze large amounts of data. You need it all in one view with easy-to-read graphs.
3. Too many cooks in the kitchen. You have different departments that need different insights and you need one place to manage all the access points.
4. Your investors want more accurate predictions into the company's future.
5. You have sensitive information. By choosing a secure cloud-based solution, you are able to manage privacy and security settings, protecting potentially your business's most powerful resource. 
6. You want to be a transparent organization and make decisions based on transparent analytics. 
7. You want to know more about your customers. 
8. You want to empower your employees to make better decisions.
9. You want to be successful! Which you simply can't do until you work to improve.

What are the different kinds of BI analytics tools?

Business analytics solutions differ depending on department and use case. Some focus on organizing your analytical point of view, while others help you manage that data. Some dive down deep, mining that data, while others give you more general overviews to present to your investors and top execs. Market intelligence software is commonly split into these categories:

• Business Analytics Software: This along with BI are the most commonly used, often interchangeable words for these business solutions. It gives you an overview of the analytics for your company's success.
• Business Intelligence Software: Also called BI, this is the more general term for accumulating all the data across organizations and automating the analysis of it.
• Big Data Analytics Software: There's no doubt that we are accumulating more big data than we could ever pretent to comprehend. This is a new branch of the BI tools that specializes in scalability, particularly when we are dealing with mind-blowing amounts of data. 
• Reporting & Dashboard Tools: Reporting and dashboard features are included in most BI tools, but if you get one that is dubbed something specifically like "data dashboard" or "data reporting tool", these may only integrate with other BI, sales and accounting tools, simply to combine all that data into a more comprehensive view.
• Data Mining Tools: This structures your seemingly endless big data into a reliable architecture that allows you to mine down into different parts of the organization. It then represents the data in both statistical and graphical ways. A data mining tool then goes to the next step of detecting patterns you can act on. The most advanced data mining software goes to the still evolving level of machine learning. 
• Predictive Analytics: Rather self-explanitory, these are analytics that allow you to get the current status on the company and use trends to predict upcoming results. Now, as the world is unpredictable, predictive analytics software doesn't predict the future but helps you make much more informed decisions based on probability of action.

Business intelligence software includes all SaaS that gives you a better view into your organization, which means that it can also include enterprise resource planning software (ERP), accounting software, sales software, and even customer relationship management software (CRM). 

How do you decide which marketing intelligence apps reviews will change the way you do business?

With so many BI solutions out there fighting for your attention, it's normal to feel overwhelmed, like all you're getting is marketing fluff. The best way to get real opinions on market intelligence solutions is by trusting the proverbial horse's mouth and reading the best software app reviews. Your objective is to find business solutions that are "just right" for your organization, so why not start by reading your competition's reviews of the software they're using? Most likely, your competition is of a comprable size as you and with similar business analytics needs. These testimonial examples from businesses like yours will help you to start making the right software buying decision. Unsure which seem right? Almost every BI solution has a free trial--use the app reviews to narrow it down to two or three apps and give em a go!