Friday, March 9, 2012

10 Business Intelligence Tools for the iPad

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed on mobile devices. And it seems that these sort of forecasts are usually over-aggressive, our commenters seem to agree that Gartner's forecast is a bit too modest. BI going mobile quickly, and tablets are leading that movement.
Here are 10 BI apps that support the iPad right now. Some are existing BI products with iPad native apps, some are Web-based BI applications with iPad support and some are clients that can connect to your existing BI solutions.

MicroStrategy

Microstrategy iPad app
MicroStrategy, a well established BI vendor, launched its iPad app in July. Last month the company announced it would be rolling out additional ways to visualize data on iPads and other mobile devices, including a new product called MicroStrategy Transaction Services which will connect mobile devices with transactional systems.

PushBI

PushBI focuses on creating clients that push BI data to users. It augments existing BI tools. PushBI offers clients for desktop and mobile environments, including Windows, iOS and Android.

QlikView

Qlikview
QlikTech is another well established BI vendor that was quick to market with an iPad app for its flagship BI product QlikView.

Roambi

Roambi iPad
Like PushBI, Roambi offers tools to help enterprises mobilize existing BI reports, and has some of the slickest looking data visualizations available. Roambi partnered with SAP to provide smooth integration between Roambi and SAP and Carbon Disclosure. It can visualize data from several other sources as well, including Crystal Reports, Excel and Salesforce.com.

TIBCO Spotfire

TIBCO is a leader in real-time intelligence for financial services. TIBCO released an iPad app for its BI application Spotfire last November.

Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a business intelligence vendor that was founded in 2003. One of its distinguishing features is its GIS integration for location intelligence. It released its iPad app in November.

Non-Native Support for the iPad

Several cloud-based BI vendors offer support for the iPad versinon of Safari, including:

Roll Your Own

Bitzer Mobile, LeapFactor and Webalo all offer tools for mobilizing existing enterprise applications. For more information, see our articles 5 New Tools for Building Mobile Enterprise Apps and 3 More Ways to Mobilize Enterprise Applications.


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