Analytics

This list of the best embedded BI platforms is led by GoodData simply because it offers the most sophisticated embedding technologies and services, and has a very good appreciation of the power of embedded analytics in a production environment. The rest are listed in alphabetical order. GoodData provides technologies and…

Most businesses are primarily concerned with customers, internal operations, suppliers and product. They are not primarily interested in business analytics. So it seems fairly obvious that if analytics is to have a place in the business then it needs to address these things – customer recruitment and retention, supply chain,…

The productivity of a BI platform is the number one concern of businesses choosing a product. While the hardware and software costs vary, these are dwarfed by the cost associated with the actual use of a platform, and as such it needs to be as productive as possible. Listed below…

Stories is a business intelligence platform that tells you what you need to know. This is quite different from traditional BI platforms where we have to discover the things that are important for us to know. The name of the product reveals the way it works. Instead of presenting a…

Overview icCube is a high performance, production oriented BI platform. In essence icCube is a single product with a Java server and JavaScript client. It comes with modest but adequate ETL capabilities, a sophisticated OLAP server and the standard language MDX (which is enhanced by over 250 additional functions), easy-to-use…

JReport is one of the unsung heroes in the world of business intelligence. Its latest release adds some advanced functionality in the form of compound crosstabs, live dashboards and enhanced mobile functionality. The main market for JReport is the OEM and systems integrator, but is also making inroads into the…

You may, or may not be aware that the use of information technology in business has never been correlated with productivity. This goes back a long way – way back to the famous statement by Robert Solow in the 1980s: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”…

In the last post on linear regression, I showed how the reassurance we might get from a nice, neatly sloping line, can often be misleading. In this post I want to explore something called Simpson’s Paradox, where an up sloping linear regression can be composed of two down sloping linear…

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” – Einstein As people progress with their visual analytics tools, so they move on from pie charts and histograms and start to embrace…