This article takes you to understand Quick BI, the preferred product for enterprise cloud data analysis

Introduction to Cloud Quick BI was once again selected and will continue to be the only Chinese company in the field to be included in the Magic Quadrant. This article will introduce the core capabilities of Quick BI, the preferred product for data analysis on the cloud.

A few days ago, the international authoritative analysis organization Gartner released the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analysis Platforms. Alibaba Cloud Quick BI was once again selected and continues to be the only Chinese company in the field to be included in the Magic Quadrant. The selection criteria for Gartner's ABI Magic Quadrant are comprehensive and stringent. Gartner will score the capabilities of vendors in various dimensions, and include vendors with outstanding performance in the Magic Quadrant.

In order to give everyone a more comprehensive understanding of Quick BI, I will start to explain it.

Quick BI is an intelligent data analysis and visualization BI product tailored for users on the cloud. It helps companies quickly complete the transition from traditional data analysis to data cloudization + analysis cloudification, and maximizes the output of business data. The fast speed is pushed to the consumption side of each organization.

1. Incubated from Alibaba's internal cloud

BI is an important data analysis tool within Alibaba. It is used in all aspects of the work of first-line juniors and management. BI tools are the basis for data-based operations and data-based decision-making.

Quick BI draws on the experience of Alibaba's internal BI design and application, and provides services to external companies through Alibaba Cloud after product incubation. In the process of transition from the era of IOE to the era of distributed data storage and computing, Alibaba found that the BI tools on the market could not meet the needs of large data volume calculations and rapid analysis, and the ability of a single tool was relatively single, unable to meet various complexities. Changing scenes. At that time, Alibaba had an explosive growth in demand for various businesses, and there was an urgent need for a data access tool that even people without a background in data development and analysis could use.

So I decided to develop a set of access tools on the distributed data storage framework.

After a period of time, the data analysis tools of different BUs flourished, some were for complex forms, some were used to make reports quickly, and some could only build reports on mobile terminals.

After landing on the moon (all internal data of Alibaba was migrated to ODPS), Alibaba launched a unified cloud BI analysis tool within Alibaba, and it continued to evolve within the group until it could not only play a role in the decision analysis of various business lines, but also It can build thematic data analysis products in line with e-commerce marketing and industry operations. It can also directly serve front-line employees in technical, operational, and product roles to quickly connect to data to generate reports. Eventually developed into a powerful BI platform for 100,000 employees to get started quickly.

In addition to paying attention to internal employees, when serving merchants on Taobao and Tmall, I found that data, as a basic resource for enterprises, was not well consumed and used. Beginning in 2017, Quick BI, a more universal basic data analysis tool for the entire industry, began to provide SaaS services to customers on the cloud. Now in addition to public clouds, it also uses agile proprietary clouds, standard proprietary clouds, and independently deployed Provide BI services to non-Alibaba Cloud customers.

2. Data joint analysis ability

Quick BI is not just moving internal BI products to the cloud intact. Internal products suitable for large Internet companies may not be suitable for a wide range of Alibaba Cloud customers.

In the beginning, Quick BI's positioning was to help customers analyze the data they stored on Alibaba Cloud, so comprehensive access was carried out according to the type of Alibaba Cloud data storage.

For enterprises whose business itself is established on Alibaba Cloud, data will be stored in various cloud databases and storage. Alibaba Cloud provides a variety of options to help large enterprises perform batch processing and streaming of data, and the processed results will also be stored On Alibaba Cloud, such as Maxcompute, RDS, ADB, Hbase, or Hologres, different types of storage provide storage and computing capabilities of hundreds of billions, tens of billions, and hundreds of billions.

In reality, some customers are still in the process of migrating to the cloud or are in a hybrid deployment. Some of their data is stored locally. This requires joint analysis of local and cloud data. Quick BI uses a self-built query engine , And the cooperation with Alibaba Cloud Data Lake Analytics products, provide a strong ability to perform joint analysis on heterogeneous data.

3. How to use Quick BI to build a data analysis system

For most data centers that are actively initiated or planned uniformly, the data analysis system or report system is generally established on a path from disorder to order, or from order to disorder and then to order.

The IT team or data analyst first establishes a business-oriented reporting system based on the understanding of the business. This fixed reporting system can only meet the needs of some businesses, while other needs need to be configured with temporary reports. As business changes, more and more reports need to go online and offline, and the original unified and fixed report system has become more and more chaotic. At this time, it needs to be refactored.

The data analysis system established by sound evolution generally includes decision analysis, business special analysis and temporary reports. Decision analysis and business topic analysis usually use fixed data products to form a report system, which is maintained by a professional data team, which can maintain a long-term stability. Temporary reports can be temporarily created and extinguished as the business changes. When the business is stable, the corresponding temporary reports will be deposited into the fixed report system.

Quick BI, which has the ability to solve complex scenarios, provides a variety of data analysis capabilities, including: dashboards, spreadsheets, self-service analysis, large screens, self-service access, etc.

• • The dashboard can create reports or data products with clear analysis ideas and certain data logic;
  • Spreadsheets are suitable for scenarios with complex styles and even cell-level adjustments, such as statements submitted by banks, and reports that government units fill in and summarized level by level. As long as you are familiar with Excel, you can easily configure it without writing SQL;
  • Self-service analysis is suitable for analyzing large-scale tables with many dimensions and indicators. The data team builds and guarantees the output of large-scale tables. Business personnel can combine different dimensions and indicators at any time according to business needs, and can locate the cause of data fluctuations and group them. Aggregate data, etc. These analyses do not need to be solidified, that is, analyze and leave;
  • There are still some scenarios where a large amount of data needs to be exported, followed by subsequent analysis or import into other systems, such as user lists, order details, etc., which can easily be millions or tens of millions. At this time, self-service data access can be easily completed.

Quick BI latest product big picture

Data analysis and visualization results can be used in multiple channels. It can be accessed not only in a PC browser, but also through a mobile phone in a mobile environment (the visualization effect is automatically adapted to the mobile phone screen). For occasions such as factories, conference rooms, event scenes, etc., images can also be projected onto a TV screen.

Whether by exporting, sharing or subscribing, when the data changes or fluctuates, it will actively push to those who follow this set of data. When companies are using DingTalk or corporate WeChat, Quick BI can be well integrated with them to improve the efficiency of viewing and analyzing data in business communication. Quick BI can actively send messages to groups or individual users, or send messages in the form of system notifications.

Dingding group can even set up intelligent robots, group members can ask Quick BI robots to find data and reports.

4. Data visualization capabilities of Quick BI

Visualization is the core capability of BI products. Quick BI believes that data visualization should be upgraded from simple data presentation to fast data analysis, and the zero-code interactive visualization operation panel can significantly improve the efficiency of data analysis.

In addition to quickly discovering the association and composition of data through interactive operations (drilling, linkage, and jump), Quick BI further provides a new way of rapid insight. The newly added indicator disassembly diagram can help users customize the indicators and latitudes of the analysis. Users can adjust the dimensions of analysis and the order of disassembly at any time, and can quickly locate influencing factors when indicators fluctuate or abnormal.

5. Self-help analysis of business staff

The business staff self-service analysis function was launched for sellers who opened stores on the group's e-commerce platform. Quick BI and business staff jointly created a business staff self-service analysis module. When sellers on Tianmao and Taobao use the business staff to conduct store data operations, they can conduct self-service analysis on the data in the business staff in the form of drag and drop when the existing reports cannot meet their needs. In the past, sellers could only check the dimensions and indicators, select the time period, and download the data to the local for analysis. Now, the analysis can be completed online, and the finished dashboard page can also be saved in the business staff. Currently, nearly two thousand stores have benefited from this.

6. Ding Ding

In early 2021, Quick BI and Dingding team will cooperate. Launched the "smart report" application in the Dingding application market to help millions of companies on Dingding analyze the tasks, forms, processes and other data generated in Dingding, and support the data generated in Dingding and the company's own data Fusion analysis of business data.

Product details: https://dp.alibaba.com/product/quickbi

Product experience: https://www.aliyun.com/product/bigdata/bi

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