Top 10: Data & Analytics Platforms

Today’s business world is driven by data. While only three of the 10 most valuable enterprises were actively taking a data-driven approach in 2008, that number has risen to seven out of 10 today.

In making sense of this data, data analytics offers a multitude of benefits to businesses, enabling them to harness the power of data to make informed decisions, enhance operational efficiency, and foster innovation. 

Here are some key advantages of data analytics for businesses:

• Informed Decision-Making: Data analytics provides businesses with valuable insights by analysing historical and real-time data. This allows companies to make evidence-based decisions, reducing the reliance on intuition or guesswork.
• Enhanced Customer Insights: Through the analysis of customer data, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences, behaviours, and trends. This enables the development of more targeted marketing strategies, personalised customer experiences, and improved customer retention.
• Operational Efficiency: By analysing operational data, businesses can identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks within their processes. This leads to improved workflows, reduced costs, and enhanced productivity.
• Competitive Advantage: Data analytics can provide a competitive edge by uncovering market trends, customer needs, and emerging opportunities before they become apparent to competitors. This allows businesses to be proactive rather than reactive in their strategic planning.

Here, we highlight 10 of the leading data and analytics platforms driving business success.

10: Splunk

Founded in 2003 to solve problems in complex digital infrastructures, today many of the world’s largest and most complex organisations rely on Splunk to keep their mission-critical systems secure and reliable.

Offering the leading unified security and observability platform, Splunk helps organisations use data at any scale to become more secure and resilient. Its platform enables cloud-powered insights for petabyte-scale data analytics across the hybrid cloud.

Splunk AI capabilities help organisations unlock more informed insights, and make human decision-making and threat response faster.

9: SAP

With SAP’s data and analytics solutions, enterprises can get the most value from their data, deliver trusted insights and extend planning and analysis. 

Its solutions enable organisations to modernise their data foundation with database technology that runs transactions and analytics on multi-model data at petabyte scale and with integrated multi-tier storage, all in one solution.

SAP also provides a set of tools to identify, gather, analyse and make available the most context-relevant data throughout the enterprise.

8: IBM

IBM’s Cognos Analytics platform is a natural language AI assistant that is always available.

It enables the transformation of business teams into power users so data analysts can focus on finding deeper insights. 

IBM’s platform allows organisations to move to the new generation of BI with AI capabilities that not only bring an accurate, trusted and complete picture of their business, but forecast what’s coming in the future, predict outcomes and explain why they may happen. 

7: SAS

Founded in 1976, SAS develops and markets a suite of analytics software, which helps access, manage, analyse and report on data to aid in decision-making. 

Today, SAS is the leader in analytics, empowering and inspiring customers to transform data into intelligence.

Its AI and analytics platform enables users to understand what is happening with their data, predict how to pivot seamlessly and make progress faster, increasing performance and productivity.

6: Oracle

Oracle’s Analytics platform offers ready-to-use services for a wide variety of workloads and data. Offering valuable, actionable insights from all types of data – in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid – Oracle Analytics empowers business users, data engineers and data scientists to access and process relevant data, evaluate predictions and make quick, accurate decisions. 

The platform addresses the needs of the entire analytics process, including data ingestion, preparation and enrichment, visualisation and collaboration. Machine learning (ML) is embedded throughout the platform to help organisations go beyond being data-driven to become analytics-driven.

5: Alteryx

Alteryx offers a leading AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics that delivers actionable insights by automating analytics. Its leading platform automates analytics across all systems to drive valuable business outcomes at scale. 

With an active user community of more than 400,000 members, Alteryx delivers intuitive, end-to-end automation of data engineering, data prep, analytics, machine learning, geospatial analytics, and AI-driven data storytelling, enabling organisations to democratise analytics and generate value with data insights.

More than 8,000 customers globally rely on Alteryx to automate analytics to improve revenue performance, manage costs, and mitigate risks across their organisations.

4: Qlik

A global leader in data analytics and integration, Qlik helps organisations use their data to solve problems, meet new objectives, and address critical business needs.

Serving over 40,000 global customers, Qlik’s portfolio provides advanced, enterprise-grade AI/ML and data management. It excels in data integration and governance, offering comprehensive solutions that work with diverse data sources. Its AI/ML tools, both practical and scalable, lead to better decisions, faster. As strategic partners, our platform-agnostic technology and expertise make our customers more competitive.

3: Amazon QuickSight

Amazon customers are using QuickSight and Generative business intelligence (BI) to solve business challenges and turn insights into innovation.

Amazon QuickSight powers data-driven organisations with unified BI at hyperscale. With QuickSight, all users can meet varying analytic needs from the same source of truth through modern interactive dashboards, paginated reports, embedded analytics and natural language queries. By incorporating its Amazon Q Gen AI assistant in QuickSight, business analysts and business users can use natural language to build, discover and share meaningful insights in seconds, turning insights into impact faster.

2: Microsoft Power BI

​​​​​​​Microsoft’s Power BI allows users to turn data into visuals with advanced data-analysis tools, AI capabilities and a user-friendly report-creation tool.

Part of the company’s Power platform, Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive and interactive insights. 

In November 2023 Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric: an end-to-end data platform that can reshape how everyone accesses, manages, and acts on data and insights by connecting every data source and analytics service together. This, according to Kim Manis, VP of Product Management, empowers data teams to more easily scale to meet the demand of the business.

“With the launch of these next-generation analytics tools, you can empower your data teams to more easily scale to meet the demand of the business,” Manis says.

1: Tableau

As the market-leading choice for modern business intelligence, Tableau’s analytics platform makes it easier for people to explore and manage data, and faster to discover and share insights that can change businesses and the world.

Founded in 2003 as a result of a computer science project at Stanford that aimed to improve the flow of analysis and make data more accessible to people through visualisation. Co-founders Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan and Christian Chabot developed and patented Tableau's foundational technology, VizQL – which visually expresses data by translating drag-and-drop actions into data queries through an intuitive interface.

Tableau not only offers a complete, integrated analytics platform, but also proven enablement resources to help customers deploy and scale a data-driven culture that drives resilience and value through powerful outcomes. Acquired by Salesforce in 2019, today, organisations everywhere – from non-profits to global enterprises, and across all industries and departments – are empowering their people with Tableau to drive change with data.