Insight & Analytics platforms, sometimes known as business intelligence (BI) platforms, provide a tool set for businesses to absorb, organize, discover, and analyze data to reveal actionable insights that can help improve decision-making and inform business strategy
Some of these products require IT implementation to build the analytical environment, connect necessary data sources, and help prepare the data for usage; others are designed to be primarily configured and used by non-expert users, without the help of IT for deployment (known as self-service). Business and data analysts, data scientists, or other business stakeholders can utilize this software to prepare, model, and transform data to better understand the day-to-day performance of the company and inform decision-making.
Fundamentally, for a product to be categorized as an analytics platform it must be an end-to-end analytics solution, which incorporates five elements: data preparation, data modeling, data blending, data visualization, and insights delivery. The reports, dashboards, and visualizations created using Insight & Analytics platforms can break down data to a granular level, depict connections and trends between multiple datasets, and create data visualizations that make the data easier to understand for non-expert stakeholders. Products which only provide the visualization component are categorized as data visualization software, which includes products primarily designed to create charts, graphs, and benchmark visualizations