10 New Business Intelligence Products To Watch

Still Big

There seems to be no slowing down in the push for innovation in business intelligence and analytics. The promise of big data continues to inspire new products to come to market -- from major vendors like Oracle, Cisco and IBM to early-stage startups. We've recently come across 10 new BI products that solution providers may want to check out, given all that all of the vendors are active in the channel. The products are either brand new releases, or received significant updates, since last fall. What follows are 10 new BI and analytics products that are worth watching.

AtScale, Inc.

Product: The AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0

What it is: Platform that aims to make it easier for businesses to run analytics directly on big-data stores in Hadoop clusters, with major advantages around scale and speed. AtScale says the product also offers governance and security benefits, including enabling users to provide access to just a part of their data set in a Hadoop cluster (rather than having to provide all of the data).

Attunity

Product: Attunity Visibility for Hadoop

What it is: Provides usage and performance metrics for data warehouses, allowing IT professionals manage their data usage more easily and improve their data warehouse performance. Attunity says the product is the only single-console option for getting data usage analytics and monitoring across enterprise data warehouse Hadoop environments.

Cisco

Product: Cisco Tetration Analytics

What it is: A platform for providing intelligence about what's going on inside a data center -- such as network flows and application insights, for instance -- to enable companies to more quickly shift to software-defined networking. Ultimately, the technology aims to dramatically simplify data-center operations, while helping to solve issues more quickly and intelligently.

IBM

Product: IBM Planning Analytics

What it is: Technology that automates planning that was previously done manually by uncovering predictive insights from data and incorporating those insights into plans. IBM said the product -- which leverages IBM's Watson Analytics and Cognos TM1 technologies -- results in more reliable plans and forecasts in the enterprise.

Information Builders

Product: WebFOCUS Business User Edition

What it is: Software that provides businesspeople with a self-service option for business intelligence. Information Builders says that its platform lets users generate insights from their data sets -- without needing to involve IT and BI developers -- and is ideal for partners looking to sell to SMBs.

Nextiva

Product: Nextiva Analytics

What it is: For businesses looking to analyze call data, Nextiva Analytics aims to serve as a way of providing crucial visibility. The product lets managers visually access and manipulate call data -- producing customizable reports and dashboards, for instance -- as a way to enable faster and better decision-making for the business.

Nintex

Product: Nintex Hawkeye

What it is: Software that provides a comprehensive view of an organization's digital workflows, through automatically capturing data related to people and processes, then generating reports to help answer difficult questions for decision makers. Nintex says that Hawkeye captures data from its own Workflow Cloud as well as from systems including SharePoint, Office 365 and Salesforce.

Oracle

Product: Big Data Discovery Cloud

What it is: A cloud service that aims to transform the way that businesses interact with their big data. The service provides a visual user interface that lets anyone find and analyze data and then share the results -- no highly specialized skills are required. Oracle further simplifies big data analytics because the software is capable of working with any type of data. Ultimately, the Big Data Discovery Cloud aims to help businesses accelerate their innovation efforts by allowing users to work with their data more quickly. The product is ideal for solution providers that want to provide their customers with cutting-edge analytics on a large scale, Oracle says.

Snowflake Computing

Product: Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse

What it is: Built with the cloud and modern-day analytics in mind, this data warehousing technology aims to enable users to easily store, transform and analyze their business data with high performance. Plus, the latest update to the product brought in new automation capabilities that eliminate some of the complexity of traditional data warehousing.

Trifacta

Product: Wrangler Enterprise v4

What it is: Solution for data wrangling that includes an improved workflow and data processing engine. Trifacta says the new release enables users to perform data wrangling on-the-fly at a larger scale than in the past.