Self Service Business Intelligence
Managing data as an asset has long been preached by data management pros, but the business users have finally caught on, elevating data managers to the board room and using data to more quickly react to changing business needs, staying ahead of competitors and to create new lines of business. Using data for business intelligence (BI) has grown into a billion dollar business with BI being one of the most important initiatives for CIOs in the past 5 years according to Gartner.
But BI is finally maturing with all the commoditization and consolidation in the market, and according to Boris Evelson of Forrester Research, “Traditional BI approaches, processes, technologies and architectures are no longer enough to continue to drive higher levels of BI adoption and increase BI maturity in enterprises. New approaches such as agile BI and BI self service by the business users are needed to supplement traditional BI.” See a recently published self service business intelligence whitepaper by Vickie Farrell.
A new type of agile business intelligence and analytics are needed to keep pace with the ever changing needs of business and data analysts. Enter self-service business intelligence. In a recent TDWI report, “BI On a Limited Budget,”, many companies are employing SQL savvy “super users” to fulfill ad hoc report requests in support of the end users, acting as “an extension of the corporate BI team, increasing the number of report writers without adding costs.” Quest Software’s Toad for Data Analysts (TDA) is geared to these “super user” data analysts, designed to make them as efficient as possible, giving them the query flexibility and good performance of SQL, with the faster query building capability of a tool like Brio.
TDA is a highly efficient tool which streamlines the development of SQL code to connect to heterogeneous databases, compare and synchronize data, perform multi-platform queries, automate report distribution and export data to Excel. Download the free trial.
About Quest Software, Inc.
Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments. For more information about Quest solutions for application management, database management, Windows management, virtualization management, and IT management, go to www.quest.com.
