Analytics and business intelligence platforms — enabled by IT and augmented by AI — empower users to model, analyze and share data. Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platforms enable organizations to understand their data. For example, what are the dimensions of their data — such as product, customer, time, and geography? People need to be able to ask questions about their data (e.g., which customers are likely to churn? Which salespeople are not reaching their quotas?). They need to be able to create measures from their data, such as on-time delivery, accidents in the workplace and customer or employee satisfaction. Organizations need to blend modeled and nonmodeled data to create new data pipelines that can be explored to find anomalies and other insights. ABI platforms make all of this possible.
Marketing dashboard tools collect and integrate marketing data from multiple sources, visualize it, and enable visualization and exploration through a web-based interface. The technology helps marketers deliver near-real-time data and reporting to stakeholders across the marketing organization and the enterprise. These tools cater to the business user rather than the technical professional, as they do not require you to manage a data warehouse or to define a semantic layer. The market features SaaS-based offerings from large, diversified providers as well as small pure-play vendors. Some of these sell marketer-focused solutions, and others have tailored their IT-focused offerings to this new buyer segment.