Thank you to everyone who joined us for last week’s webinar! The webinar was a continuation of our business software 101 series and focused on available business intelligence (BI) applications for reporting dashboards. With the ever increasing number of online systems and related data, there are troves of information available for managers and executives to pore over when analyzing performance, planning for future opportunities, or identifying inefficiencies. This webinar talked through some of the different challenges decision makers face in this process and low-cost, but powerful, tools that are available to help in dealing with this challenge.
To show the power of these tools we demo-ed four different BI applications; two open source and two commercial Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.
First was Metabase, an open source project with a strong developer community continually working to improve it (see GitHub page here), is one of the easiest BI tools to set up and get started with for non-technical users. This is one of our favorite tools as it doesn’t require users to be versed in SQL and it’s easy to generate automatic reports that can be emailed or integrated with messaging software such as Slack (which we love here at Anant!).
Next, we covered a more technical reporting tool called Redash. Users need to know some SQL or other database query languages to maximize its utility. The reporting tools are robust with the ability to handle and visualize large amounts of data.
We finished with two commercial products, Cyfe and Domo. Cyfe is a lightweight monitoring tool that can be paired with Alexa, Google trends, WordPress and more. Domo, which is widely considered to be one of the most sophisticated data integration and analysis tools, is an expansive platform that anyone interested in BI tools should check out before making a final decision (they have a free one-user demo account that you can sign up for here). We like Domo for its ability to handle queries that rely on millions of rows and its data manipulation features, which help with the process of extracting, transforming, and loading data. This process is commonly referred to as ETL and we have done it for a number of our clients.In short, while Domo is not open source, it provides a breadth of features not found in the other applications and is much more customizable to your needs.
You can find both a recording of the presentation and the accompanying slides below:
http://www.slideshare.net/AnantCorp/webinaronlinedashboards20161013
If you’re interested in learning more about please reach out to us directly or join us next month. We will look at approaches to managing the information and knowledge inside your company. You will come away with ideas about how to solve the challenge of finding the information you need but seems to be ever more difficult to find.
Business Software 101 Series:
Webinar 1 – Building Online Business Software 101 (B2B)
Webinar 2 – How to Connect Online Business Software 101 (B2B)
Webinar 3 – Unifying Business Information with Portals and Dashboards (B2B)
Webinar 4 – Organizing Business Information with Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management (B2B)
