So that I might see: Data modeling and visualization

ORDER REPRINTS DOWNLOAD COMMENT DISCUSS SHARE

it doesn’t matter how good the view from the C-suite is if you can’t see what’s going on in your network

Industry leaders

Which is not to say that a number of companies aren’t already doing excellent work.

TIBCO Spotfire is a capacity planning and forecasting, network operations recovery, network maintenance and executive insight with big, beautiful visualizations that are meaningful among investors and C-suite denizens as well as the data management set. In its 2015 Agile BI Forrester Wave™ report, Forrester Research says that “TIBCO Spotfire leads with advanced data visualization — a space shuttle of Agile BI,” and notes that data exploration and visualization is just the beginning for the solution. Advanced predictive analytics and interactive analysis are baked in, too.

Forrester also cited Microsoft as a leader in the space, saying that, “Microsoft Power BI leads the Agile BI pack.” The analysts note that Microsoft Power’s low acquisition cost, hybrid (on-premise and cloud) deployment and “completeness of BI functionality (from data sourcing to visual storytelling)” set it apart from the competition.

SAS’s Visual Analytics platform, likewise, earns praise from Forrester for its performance and its scalability. “The pure in-memory architecture makes Visual Analytics highly scalable and allows users to visualize and analyze data interactively, with very low latency,” the firm said in its fall 2015 Agile BI Forrester Wave™ report.

Heavyweights SAP and Oracle also did well in the report, as did smaller firms Tableau and Qlik, which, as I write this, is in the midst of a three billion dollar acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.

Large or small, what all of these firms share is a common understanding that data modeling and visualization is about more than crafting pretty pictures. The ability to represent complex network performance data in a way that is meaningful for non-technical audiences is of tremendous value to CSPs who want to ensure that strategic decisions about deployments, maintenance, and other activity are made by stakeholders with an equally comprehensive view of the goals and circumstances of the business as a whole.

After all, it doesn’t matter how good the view from the C-suite is if you can’t see what’s going on in your organization.