Not too long ago, any time an end user wanted to generate any type of report, they had to ask someone in the IT department to generate it. In the last several years, significant advances have been made toward democratizing business intelligence (BI), thanks mainly to Tableau Software and Microsoft Power BI.

In fact, the Power BI software makes it relatively trivial for any end user to access data from different sources, clean it up, and dynamically generate reports on an ad hoc basis in a matter of minutes. Tableau Software provides a set of richer analytics tools that make it possible to not just create reports, but also interrogate data that enables end users to run a richer set of “what-if” analyses. Power BI is also meant to be consumed as a cloud service, while Tableau gives organizations the option of deploying its software on-premises, on a public cloud, or consuming it as a service.

Source: itbusinessedge.com