The adoption of advanced technologies is creating new possibilities for businesses to generate higher revenue growth and improve customer experiences. This, however, depends on understanding and leveraging data to make informed decisions, modernize existing solutions, and build new business models. Business Intelligence (BI) is the most advanced method to unlock value from a large volume of disparate data. 

BI refers to the collective strategies and processes used in the collection and analysis of data to optimize performance and increase efficiency. BI offers major advantages. Most important is the ability of BI tools to:

• Catalyze rapid decision making 
• Convert complex data into an easily understandable format
• Integrate analytics with AI/ML algorithms 
• Turn data into actionable insights by taking current and historical data into account
• Tackle specific use cases as required

Legacy BI

Most of the older BI, known as legacy BI tools, was launched in the late 1990s-early 2000s. These form the backbone of the modern BI tools in circulation today. As there weren’t any proper methods for visualization of data, these tools were useful earlier, but now they tend to create more problems than they can solve. One of the major drawbacks was that these tools could not manage the huge data revolution that occurred in the late 2000s. 

As the data volumes and complexities increase, legacy BI tools become obsolete. Some of the challenges that companies face while using legacy BI tools are:

• High cost of ownership: Due to outdated pricing plans and structures, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is higher as compared to the modern counterparts.
• Bottlenecks: Since operating legacy BI tools require specialized expertise, only a handful of people in a given business (such as the IT team) are capable of building reports. The number of reports required for decision making and the average time taken to generate each report are high, making it difficult to leverage data.
• Security issues: With less updates and security patches, BI systems become outdated faster, and are prone to hackers and other malicious tools.
• Data delays: Legacy BIs frequently have difficulty in refreshing a large amount of data, consuming a lot of time in generating reports that are often times inconsistent.
• Difficulty in sharing and embedding: Legacy BI tools have no dedicated features for embedding dashboards and reports on the user’s website, thus creating hindrance in sharing the reports or making them publicly available.

Future of BI

Modern BI offers numerous advantages that make it powerful as compared to its legacy counterparts.

How Quantiphi Can Help

Quantiphi has enabled multiple customers to make a bigger business impact and assisted Looker executives in solving the most complex problems faced by the customers. Quantiphi has engaged more than 80 accounts, most of them being Fortune 500 companies.

Within one year of becoming a Looker partner, Quantiphi has become an:

• Advanced implementation and subcontracting partner
• Reseller partner
• Looker PS subcontracting partner  
• Delivery training verified partner

As Google Cloud’s Global Data & Analytics Partner of the Year 2020 and 2021, Quantiphi has repeatedly demonstrated its strong Looker capabilities across all industries. Thus, making us the partner of choice for leading a customer’s BI modernization journey.

BI Modernization Evaluation Tool

In a flagship collaboration with Google Cloud, Quantiphi has developed BI Modernization evaluation tools (or accelerator modules) to significantly speed up the modernization process and enable businesses to make greater impacts leveraging your data.
Once the pioneer in manual BI modernization, Quantiphi has now spearheaded the process of automating BI modernization as well. Quantiphi has successfully built an evaluation tool for modernizing the customer’s Legacy IBM Cognos to Looker with  Microsoft SSRS & SSAS.

Why is the BI Modernization Evaluation Tool important?

The process of modernizing BI manually is complex and tedious that presents challenges for organizations, such as:

• Difficulty in gathering use cases: Manual scouring of numerous notebooks to discover use cases and requirements
• Difficulty in planning and prioritization: Involves manual identification of user groups and assigning priorities based on use cases
• Manual development of LookML: Developers have to manually develop and create LookML projects and model to support all use cases
• Costly and slow modernization: BI Modernization is usually expensive and they entail various risks in terms of project delivery and timely task completion

Quantiphi + Google PSO’s BI Modernization Evaluation Tool /Accelerator solves the problems that plague a typical manual modernization journey. The evaluation tool has been designed to make modernization efficient, quick, and impactful. Let’s take a deeper look at the advantages that the evaluation tool offers:

• Automated gathering of use cases: Accelerator expedites evaluations of current legacy deployments and use-case discovery.
• Automated planning and prioritization: Planning and prioritizing are now easy and automated with the accelerator. It also provides smart and effective suggestions.
• Automated development of LookML and optimization: Accelerator automates generation and optimization of LookML models, supporting all use cases.
• Quick and inexpensive modernization: Modernization is now quick and inexpensive, as the accelerator replaces many otherwise required steps, and ensures timely completion. 

Modernize your BI today

Modernizing BI is vital to stay ahead in today’s fast-paced business environment. Learn more about the best-in-class services offered by Quantiphi+Looker and how to get started with your BI modernization journey using the evaluation tool. Get in touch with our experts.