Have you been comparing the costs for your business intelligence software or questioning the price you already paid? If so, you’ve noticed that prices vary. You’re not sure why a subscription to Product A costs $60,000 more per month than Product B–or why Product C is bizarrely cheap.
We’re here to help.
Solver has been in the software business for 25+ years. We know that price matters. We also know that the stakes are high because your organization will waste tens of thousands of dollars on a software implementation redo if you get this wrong. Finally, we know that choosing the right software takes some strange, out-of-the-box thinking.
So, before you do any more price comparisons, check out our three rather unusual tips to help you find the best software, at the best price.
No one buys software because they like collecting software. How weird would that be? Instead, you buy software because it helps your organization achieve your goals. When you invest in business intelligence (BI) software, you’re looking for a solution to help you collect, sort out, and analyze data … but what you really want is a tool to help you see what you should do and when you should do it–effortlessly.
For example, a good BI solution will store a wide range of data in its data warehouse and use that data to answer your pressing questions such as “Was the company more profitable last quarter or in Q3 2020?” After you know the answer, the software should also help you understand what you did better in the more profitable quarter, and should help you generate “what if” scenarios to see how you would do in Q3 of this year if you made various changes.
The tech industry calls this approach “data-driven,” and modern companies strive to be data-driven because it brings a lot of benefits. It can help your organization:
Does it really work? You bet it does. According to Forrester Research, companies that are experienced in using a data-driven approach for insights are eight times more likely to say they grew by 20% than companies that are just beginning to use data for insights.
However, becoming a data-driven organization is not an easy task. According to the Harvard Business Review, data-driven companies must democratize access to data and build a culture in which data-driven decisions are modeled from the top down. The use of data should be a normal, everyday expectation for everyone in the organization. Managers and the C-Suite should show the data behind every decision they make–and employees should expect to deliver their own data-backed proof of their work if they want to be taken seriously.
The best way to promote the truth is to make sure every employee has access to the same version of the data at the same time, in the same format, and with the same functionality.
We agree with Harvard Business Review that suggests you make consistency the rule by using one system for all your data tasks, instead of each department or role using a different tool with a different programming language. When you use disparate systems, you’ll need to reconcile and “translate” the data each time you share it with a different individual or department–and each system will inevitably create its own data silo.
Conversely, when everyone knows how to use the one data tool and can access appropriate data for their needs, everyone on your team will be better equipped to problem-solve together, cross-departmentally. This will avoid those tiresome data bottlenecks that slow down your company’s agility.
To make sure everyone is using the one data tool, you’ll want to find one with enough data warehouse storage to bring cross-departmental data together under one roof. As you’re doing your research for your BI software price comparison, take a moment to check up on the data warehouse tool. Is it built on a secure, scalable, and trusted cloud sicj as Microsoft Azure? Is it HIPAA-compliant and SOC2-compliant, regulatory mandates that are key for AI initiatives? Does the data warehouse cloud provide redundancy and backups? These are important considerations and can significantly impact a software’s value.
If you build your data-driven culture properly, each department and job role at your organization will naturally start exploring the data and using it to predict the success of various approaches. This is precisely what a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article recommends: that you get employees involved by having them seek out and back up their data for every suggestion or decision. Using one data tool, employees can build on each other’s suggestions with less wasted time and effort. As a result, your company will grow faster than ever before.
This is a fantastic outcome … but there’s a catch. Different departments and job roles will require a wide range of different BI software capabilities to understand, analyze, and present the data relevant to them:
Each of these actions builds your company’s data culture and gets you closer to the 8x growth that Forrester Research found in their study, but each of these actions requires more functionality from your one data tool.
Adding on new modules and data connectors can drive up costs and take valuable time and energy away from your data-driven initiatives, so the smartest way to encourage your data-driven culture, maximize efficiency, and keep costs low, is to look for an all-inclusive BI software solution. To make sure your needs are met, choose one that provides a generous data warehouse, unlimited data connectors, and a built-in marketplace with free templates that get your team off the ground fast with a variety of reporting, budgeting, and forecasting options.
To increase adoption rates and streamline processes, you’ll want to ensure the all-inclusive solution you choose provides free, on-demand training that dives deep into each software capability for a wide range of roles. That way, everyone will be able to learn how to use the tools they need, precisely when they need them.
You’ll also want to make sure you can securely share reports or other data layouts with people outside your organization, quickly, easily, and automatically.
Finally, you’ll want to make sure you choose a solution flexible enough to slice and dice the data from different areas and levels of the company.
And you may want to limit your search to BI software that can be accessed through a web browser. This last one isn’t necessary, but it limits the need for costly additional IT work since you won’t have to install and maintain the software on each device individually.
Remember those varied price comparisons we used as an example at the beginning of this article? As you continue your own business intelligence software price comparison, use the tips in this article to help you determine the actual value of each software solution for your organization.
For example:
Product A (the very expensive one) may be an all-inclusive enterprise product with an extremely large number of user licenses–something like 5,000. It may also provide comprehensive, out-of-the-box templates and workflows that meet the needs of a wide range of departments and roles, such as R&D, sysadmin, and chief compliance officer.
If your business is large enough to use that many user seats and prefers complete out-of-the-box reporting, forecasting, and analytics capabilities for your massive in-house team, the extra $60K per month for that product is likely to provide a lot of value to you.
Product B (the medium-priced option) may also be an all-inclusive solution, but it may not have out-of-the-box templates for every imaginable role and department in a large enterprise. It may come with a good “starter” range of templates for common departments and roles, such as Finance and Sales, as well as an easy way to build your reports and forecasts so you can grow your BI capabilities as your business grows. At this price point, the product is also likely to simply charge per user.
If you have a small- to mid-sized company and you are willing to dedicate some training time to educate your staff on how to use their new BI software to gain insight into the past, present, and potential future of your company, a middle-ground option like this is likely to provide a lot of value for you.
Product C (the bizarrely inexpensive one) may likely be a starter product with canned reports and a lot of added-cost modules and integrations. In products like these, data connector costs can add up quickly as you try to set up more and more integrations for each user and each third-party software. Naturally, you’ll end up choosing to rely on export/imports to get data from one system to another most of the time, which means your data will be spread out all over a wide range of spreadsheets, and often stored locally on computers. You will also need to purchase new modules each time you want to increase your capabilities. Forecasting and budgeting are often very costly add-on modules.
Depending on the price, this may provide value for a short time, especially if you have a small organization with fewer than 25 people and don’t integrate many third-party solutions to your ERP. It’s unlikely that this will provide long-term value; if your team truly becomes data-driven, your increased need for add-ons and connectors will make your costs balloon.
If only you already had all-inclusive BI software with the ability to run “what if” scenarios, you could use it to help you determine whether options A, B, or C would be best for your needs.
Or something else entirely.
As you can see, your business intelligence software price comparison should be less about the initial investment cost–and more about the software’s long-term functionality and flexibility to meet your growing needs.
But that’s not to say that your initial investment cost doesn’t matter. It very much does.
The best solution for you will be one that’s flexible, easy to learn, meets the needs of everyone at your organization (and then some), and offers a fast ROI with a reasonable monthly subscription cost that includes all your employees.