Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

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.

Still relying on spreadsheets? For many finance teams, reporting remains a slow, manual grind—like trying to run a marathon in flip-flops. It’s possible, but exhausting and inefficient. In today’s fast-paced business world, where agility and accuracy are non-negotiable, manual processes simply can’t keep up. Bottlenecks, duplicated efforts, and error-prone data handling drag down progress and divert your team’s talent away from higher-impact work.

The evolving market landscape is driving an urgent need for a unified enterprise performance management (EPM) solution, as finance teams face increasing pressures from several fronts. Rapid technological advancements, heightened competition, and the growing complexity of global markets have made financial agility and real-time decision-making critical to maintaining a competitive edge.

Every year, Data Summit attracts data professionals to Boston for three days to exchange ideas and innovation. In 2025, the event was dedicated to data management trends, Big Data, business intelligence (BI), analytics, as well as emerging innovation in AI and machine learning. At the Data Summit, Sami Akbay, insightsoftware’s Head of Data Analytics Projects, hosted a session on the evolution of BI, the rise of generative AI, and the shift toward insight-driven workflows.

Data is everywhere, but transforming it into clear, actionable insights is easier said than done. For organizations using Qlik, the platform offers a strong foundation for analysis, but how do you take your dashboards from functional to exceptional? Enter Vizlib from insightsoftware, the game-changing Qlik add-on that empowers users to turn basic dashboards into engaging data stories.