What qualifies a BI-Analytics vendor as an appropriate choice?

Finding the pearl in the data ocean can be trickier at times even while using a BI-Analytics solution that may not be rightly suited for the exact business insight needs. There are many BI vendors out there off the shelve, but the fact remains that, we cannot invite all of them to demonstrate the product or conduct a trial if online services permit. Fundamentally, shortlisting a BI vendor involves many sequential steps like researching, gathering & prioritizing BI requirement, determining use cases & tool categories and reviewing vendor materials in order to eliminate those who do not fit on the base line and then further identify candidates for the IT mandate. After the IT sanctions on the selected vendors, an in-depth trial and demo can be employed.

Producing the vendor shortlist and implementing a BI solution, essentially requires following sequence of steps to be performed by the organizations.

Identify Requirements:

1. Business needs
   
2. Data Discovery
   
3. Technology capability

The above right practices are followed as the Industry standard by the organizations however these are typically cumbersome at times to execute, when companies are not sure about the scalabilities of above contextual attributes.

As a quickie solution, if companies are short of time and ideas, they can instead select the BI analytics tool that's the best fit for its use cases, considerate to its budget and which can be implemented leveraging its resources and skills. To still simplify the process, companies may wish to classify the features and functions as following to consider as essential, nice to haves and not essential features.

*Essential :- This classification should be explicit or obvious. In other sentence, if the product doesn't have this specific feature, it's eliminated from further consideration.

*Nice to haves :- Although nice to have features aren't needed essentially, however they often turn out to be the key differentiators in selecting a product.

*Not Essential:- Many BI Analytics products have a vast list of features that an organization, may never use. In that scenario the wisdom lies in not wasting time while examining these aspects of products during the evaluation process.

While evaluating different vendors during the shortlisting, an organization need to concentrate on what they need specifically, since each vendor offers a different set of features as explained by the following report.

BI Vendor Landscape & Performance - Mid market segment

CAUTION:- Although a product may have the features and plugin supports that meet the underlying criteria, there may be special forethought going on for understanding how those features are obtained. For example, in order for a BI analytics tool to provide these features, are any of the following needed?

1. Custom coding.
   
2. The purchase of an add-on product from a third party vendor.
   
3. A particular product edition, such as an enterprise versus a basic edition.
   

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