Salient Business Intelligence Review

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Product Details

Salient Management Company’s platform, the Collaborative Intelligence Suite, encompasses all forms of business intelligence – from extracting data to analyzing information to creating dashboards to sharing reports and collaborating with other people.  Salient has made this platform user-friendly, scalable, and available to all users within a company.

We will discuss each function that makes up this platform:

Data integration – Salient accepts data from a variety of sources, such as Web, third-party data, ETL, and ERP. However, Salient offers its proprietary ETL tool called the Salient ETL.  The Salient ETL tool allows users to incorporate data via the drag-and-drop technology. This is a good tool for companies that have a large amount of data to analyze.  The three steps in using this tool consists of designing intelligence based on business objective to mapping source data to automating updates of data feeds.

Data technology – With its Analytical Data Mart, Salient allows for scalability and fast queries – reportedly running a query in 3 seconds or less. It also can store large amounts of data in less space, and also cuts down on time-consuming integrating and processing tasks.

Visualization – Salient’s visual data mining tool, the Analytical Workstation, allows users to see all types of real-time data, information, and relationships in one place. This tool comes with over 30 pre-built visualization and chart types. Users can also create storyboards to guide others in the analytical process. Users can also filter data based on specific settings – this tool automatically saves those settings.  Users can also create macros and send them to email, to folders, on post on a company intranet – macros can even be exported to Excel.

Drillable Dashboards – As the name explains, users can create drillable dashboards  – by drilling deeper into the data and responding to any actionable information quickly. This tool provides unlimited drill down options, simple drag and drop functionality, and allows users to drill down in published dashboards. Users can share dashboards and reports to the Web – and can access dashboards via their mobile devices.  Please note that Salient is planning to introduce apps in 2014 for iOS and Android devices, including an offline mode.

Knowledge Manager – The Knowledge Manager functionality works like a social networking tool in that it allows other users to post comments, images, and other information right on the dashboards. Users can also share dashboards in a variety of ways and formats – from videos to links to slideshows to PDFs and Word docs.

 

 

 

Features

We've indicated several standard features of Salient below - however we want to mention two of its optional features: Geo Analytics and Salient360.

Geo Analytics is an optional add-on to the Salient CIS Analytical Workstation. Users can work this feature to track demographics of current and potential customers, such as gender, income, etc. This is an ideal function for sales and marketing fields to help find potential leads or to discover if the product is working in a specific location.

Salient360 is a newer feature that links to Salient's Analytical Data Mart to Microsoft Excel. Users can bring data into Excel for further investigation and to help with budgeting and forecasting. Users can access Salient360 via Excel, bring the data from the Analytical Data Mart, work with the data in Excel (i.e. calculating budgets and running statistical functions), and then bring that data back into the Analytical Data Mart to monitor the accuracy of the "What-If" questions.

Target Market

Salient has over 115,000 users in more than 300 companies, including industries such as government, healthcare, and food and beverages. We've compiled a partial list of its clients below:

Implementation/Integration

Salient Management Company provide a four-phase training tier. The first phase involves a conference call between Salient and a company's top managers to discuss the company's needs, what features they want, business processes, and who will be using the platform. The second phase is a remote training session with advanced users to develop pre-set bookmarks and dashboards that will be used as a starting point. The third phase is an on-site training session with all users that will be involved with the Salient software. And finally, the fourth phase consists of any training followup and to discuss issues and success of the platform roll-out. The fourth phase takes places about three weeks after the onsite training session.

Customer Service & Support

Customer service support includes knowledge-sharing forums, interactive tutorials, access to webinar training sessions, and ability to contact product support by live chat and email.

Shortcomings

Native mobile apps were introduced in 2013 for Android and iOS devices but reportedly have not been widely used by many of Salient's customers - Salient is planning to introduce additional apps for these devices, including an offline mode.

Salient also has a small sales presence in the global BI market, as it primarily sells to North American customers. However, it is improving this as it has expanded its partner network in Australia and Latin America.

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About

Salient Management Company has over 25 years of BI experience. It helps all users work with large amounts of data in a quick and flexible manner. With Salient's Data Mining technology, users can find root causes of their data issues and work with data outliers - as well as make important business decisions. Salient offer solutions in revenue management, supply and demand chain, finance, and merchandising and category optimization.

Salient has been recognized as a SAP-certified partner and has been in the Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant survey for 2013 and 2014.

Salient employs over 120 people at its New York headquarters.

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