Business Intelligence Platform (BI Platform)

A business intelligence platform—or BI platform—serves as a foundation for development teams to get analytics projects off the ground faster than coding everything themselves. A business intelligence platform is especially beneficial for embedded analytics projects that require highly customizable options as well as quick release times.

Application teams facing a business intelligence project often struggle with the « build vs. buy » dilemma. This often boils down to a choice between faster releases that offer very little customization with a third-party product, or more custom and tailored releases that take longer because they are code intensive and built from scratch.

A BI platform provides a third option. The business intelligence platform allows an application team to customize exactly what they need while reducing time to market by providing a litany of pre-built elements (including charts, dashboards, and customization themes) that serve as a ready-made infrastructure for development teams. As a result, developers avoid having to write and check every line of code as they would if they were building the application from the ground up.

A modern business intelligence platform also supports self-service analytics by making it easy for end users to build their own dashboards and reports. True self-service BI capabilities empower users to manipulate dashboards, reports, and visualizations themselves—without constantly sending ad-hoc analytics requests to their IT or application development teams. Additionally, a best-of-breed business intelligence platform offers turnkey analytics security that integrates seamlessly with the application’s existing infrastructure.