Dashboards & Competition: Who are Dashboard Vendors

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There are tons of vendors providing Dashboard technology in one form or other. Most of these vendors are huge software companies and they charge a hefty license fee for their software. Do you want to spend 100K to million dollars on their software? This is just the license fee. You need to account for the consultants who will come and help you configure the system, the consultants easily charge  around $200/hr (average). Plus you may need to buy additional hardware and then  add training cost to it. So the final cost of the system could easily be over a small business’s budget.

Rather than listing the vendor names, here is an easy way to find the vendor list. Just Google it!

http://www.google.com/search?q=dashboards (the vendors are on the right)

You see, Google advertising is filled with all the vendors with big marketing budget. The key-word ‘Dashboard’ is extremely expensive and highly competitive.

Typically most of the vendors provide a server based solution i.e. you may need additional servers to install the software and there are lot of components to their system. For instance, Oracle’s OBIEE comes with ad-hoc reporting, dashboards, alerting and whole lot of things which may never be utilized in a typical small business operations. Heck, it takes months to just get the reporting and dashboard piece up and running in production. Yes, the keyword is “production” or “going live” with the system. The time to market is huge, almost feels equivalent to the money you spent on it.

The more you pay, Shouldn’t the time to market be reduced?

The opposite of it seems to be more true. Every vendor claims for a shorter implementation time but do your own due deligence.

Here is a list of Dashboard vendors in no particular order. Most of these vendors provide dashboards as just one component of their BI system

  • Oracle (OBIEE, DBI for e-business, Discoverer + Portal)
  • Xcelsius (Now Business Objects –> SAP)
  • Cognos
  • Business Objects (Now SAP)
  • Pentaho (Open source)
  • iDashboards
  • Visualmining
  • Dundas
  • Qlikview
  • MicroStrategy
  • InfoCaptor (that’s us 🙂

This list is generated through random research on Google. If you know of any other tools or would like to add more details to it, please mention them in the comments and we will update the list.

The Core Tools

Create dashboard for any Database

Data Visualizer and Dashboard Application
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This is the best dashboard software for its price. One good thing we did was to hire their consulting services to build few dashboard prototypes and provide some quick dashboard training.
- Terry Seal, IL
We evaluated Xcelsius and Qlikview and the cost for organization to implement dashboards was quoted over 10,000 USD. For fraction of the above quoted price, we were able to buy the licenses for the web based dashboard software and get some free training. This is truly a dashboard software for small businesses like us.
IT Manager of a Trucking company, OH