Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Picture this: As you’re analyzing sales data in Qlik or in Power BI, you spot an obvious error in a customer name and think “I wish I could just fix this right here instead of sending another email to IT.” If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. The good news is that the business intelligence (BI) world is finally listening. Gone are the days when BI platforms were solely for consuming and analyzing historical data.

The Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study from Dresner Advisory Services is one of the most recognized annual benchmarks for BI and analytics. It captures how organizations are investing, what priorities they set, and which technologies are delivering the most value. The 2025 edition highlights steady growth in BI spending and shifts in user objectives, from efficiency and revenue impact to security and data quality.

Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool, and it’s useful for more than numbers. Many people use Excel to manage tasks in their everyday lives beyond financial calculations. Most Excel users aren’t aware of all the intricate tips and tricks that help you get the most out of Excel. There are so many functions and formulas to help you slice and dice numbers or give that data a new look, it’s impossible to recount them all.

Your brand isn’t just a logo anymore. It’s a promise that lives across dozens of digital touchpoints your customers encounter daily. Whether you’re manufacturing industrial equipment or consumer goods, every product detail, specification, and image becomes part of your brand story. And here’s the thing: if you’re not controlling that story, someone else is writing it for you.

You can never have too much data, right? But sometimes it feels like that’s the problem when you’re trying to get your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to play nice with Excel and quickly give you the reports you need. It’s a common challenge for finance teams, and you can fix it. Creating a bridge to make all that ERP data easily accessible in Excel is the key to getting the business intelligence (BI) reports you need quickly.

Your customers want dashboards and real-time analytics from your data. You’ve built a REST API thinking you’re providing great data access. But there’s a fundamental architectural mismatch creating hidden friction.

When Microsoft released translytical task flows with write back, Power BI took a big leap. This is just the beginning of Microsoft enhancing write back capabilities within Power BI. Let’s take a look at where this currently stands, and where it is going. Microsoft’s translytical task flows bring native write back to Power BI. That’s a massive shift: Power BI becomes a two-way street—you can finally write data back, not just read it.

Let’s face it. Data lakehouses are the new normal, but that does not mean they are easy to use. Apache Iceberg gives you version control, schema evolution, and fine-grained partitioning. Trino lets you query it all with blazing speed. When it is time to plug that into your BI tools or analytics pipelines, things often grind to a halt. The problem is not your data or your engine. It is your connector. Architecting a data lakehouse is one thing. Getting it to actually perform is another.

Creating dashboards and reports shouldn’t require a technical background, or hours of your users’ time. When applications lack user-friendly analytics, customers are forced to depend on IT just to understand their own data. That’s where conversational BI comes in. Whether you’re a business leader or a data analyst, conversational BI adapts to how you work, learns your preferences, and helps you move from question to insight faster than ever before.

The journey from disconnected data silos to self-service automation and predictive visibility is well underway for many finance organizations. But the million-dollar question remains: what’s the actual return on investment from this transformation? Beyond time savings and process improvements, modern finance transformation drives strategic value that directly impacts the bottom line. Adding AI into the mix turbocharges these benefits.