Gaining access to business insights is critical to enhancing operational efficiency and driving digital transformation through effective decision-making. Besides, it aids in optimizing marketing strategies to target the right set of customers and drive better conversions. Evidently, business intelligence (BI) tools have become increasingly important for businesses of all types and sizes to successfully run their operations. At the same time, it enables businesses to gain a competitive edge and sustain the cut-throat competition in the market. However, it is equally important to choose the right BI tools to extract maximum benefits and accelerate the returns on investment.
In this post, we walk you through the most crucial aspects of BI application development as well as the most effective BI tools in the market. But before we jump into the subject matter, let’s explore the significance of using business intelligence tools.
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What To Expect From BI Application Development?
Enterprises belonging to different industries produce massive amounts of data every single day. Most of this data comes from online sources like websites, email, and social media. According to experts, this data holds immense significance and it may provide valuable insights into customers’ likes, preferences, and buying habits. Nevertheless, a majority of enterprises only utilize a small percentage of this data, since the data is unstructured and hence, difficult to process.
BI tools incorporate powerful analytics features, enabling enterprises to model, analyze, and process huge amounts of structured/unstructured data. BI application development gives you the ability to capitalize on your customer data and use it to strengthen marketing strategies and sales efforts. Several organizations use BI tools to improve their customer relationships and deliver personalized customer experiences across multiple online platforms. Other crucial features of a BI tool include intelligent decision-making, trends forecasting, customer behavior analysis, and predictive analytics. Let’s move ahead and explore the important factors to consider while selecting BI tools for your business.
Selecting The BI Tools
When it comes to BI application development, there are all sorts of tools available in the market for different business use cases. However, it is critical to choose the right ones as you don’t want to invest in technologies that are less likely to benefit your business in the long run. Below are the most crucial aspects of business intelligence and the respective tools that we use to achieve diverse business objectives.
Data Visualization and Analysis
It is the graphical representation of business data that incorporates several visual elements like graphs, charts, maps, and tables. Data visualization tools have become increasingly popular for analyzing business data and revealing hidden patterns and layers that would otherwise go unnoticed. Enterprises can use such techniques to evaluate customer behavior, understand market trends, and make accurate product forecasts. At Oodles ERP, we use the following business intelligence tools for BI application development with a focus on implementing data visualization features.
At Oodles ERP, we use the following tools for data visualization and analysis:
BIRT
BIRT is an open-source reporting system and data analysis tool from Eclipse Foundation that creates insightful models for easy data visualization. It can be embedded into rich client applications, web applications, and integrates seamlessly with Java applications to produce compelling reports.
Apache Superset
It is an open-source software tool for data exploration that enables organizations to visualize their data using detailed charts and graphical representations. Apache Superset is fast, lightweight, and offers ample features for data visualization including simple line charts and detailed geospatial charts. Besides, it seamlessly integrates with all modern databases and is capable of handling data at a petabyte-scale.
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Big Data Analytics
Big data analytics, as the name suggests, is a complex process of analyzing and examining big data. It is a quintessential part of BI application development that aims at revealing hidden patterns in customer data to identify their likes, preferences, and buying habits. At the same time, it aids in predicting market trends, facilitates customer behavior forecasting, and drives intelligent decision-making.
Below are the tools that we use at Oodles ERP to implement big data analytics features in varied business applications.
Apache Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is a software library and framework that incorporates a network of distributed computers to solve complex problems related to data and computation. It is an open-source project from the Apache Software Foundation that aims at processing massive amounts of data. Besides, Hadoop facilitates distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model.
Apache Spark
Spark is a unified analytics engine that facilitates the large-scale processing of big data. It combines several libraries including DataFrames, GraphX, MLlib, Spark Streaming, and runs seamlessly on Hadoop YARN, Amazon EC2, and Kubernetes. Besides, you can also run it in its standalone cluster mode. Apache Spark is also a popular ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tool that is mainly used for data transformation purposes.
Apache Cassandra
Cassandra is a distributed, NoSQL-based database management system that is capable of handling large volumes of data across commodity servers. It mainly focuses on providing scalability and high availability without leaving any single point of failure.
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Data Warehousing and Data Mining
Data warehousing is an important part of business intelligence that deals with collecting and managing data from different sources to provide meaningful insights. It is a core component of business intelligence that lets you collect data from heterogeneous sources and process it for reporting and analysis. During BI application development, we use the following tools for data warehousing:
Apache Hive
Apache Hive is a derivative of the popular Big Data processing tool, Apache Hadoop. Unlike the latter, Hive is a data warehouse software tool that mainly finds its use in data querying and analysis. It provides an interface similar to SQL databases for querying data stored in databases and file systems in integration with Hadoop.
AWS Redshift
Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse solution from Amazon that lets you handle large volumes of data and perform complex database migrations. AWS Redshift is used by many fortune 500 companies, as well as startups and SMEs to handle their analytical workloads.
Why Choose Oodles ERP For BI Application Development?
We, at Oodles ERP, provide end-to-end BI software development services to enhance business performance through accurate planning, forecasting, and improved decision making. Our enterprise-grade BI application development services enable enterprises to capitalize on their customer data, improve marketing strategies and sales efforts. We use open-source BI tools and next-gen technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data to develop data-driven business solutions. For more information, visit erpsolutions.oodles.io or send us your queries at [email protected].
