Can you give an overview of the differences between a BI Platform and a Dashboard Tool? And please also give 1 or 2 samples (technology/product) for each to illustrate your points.
Update: I am working with MS BI stack (BI Platform), and Component Art (Dashboard Tool). But I have not started too long. And there are other platforms and tools I do not have experience with.
A BI Platform/Suite will be more of a full-stack solution that will usually include the following:
So it's basically an End To End BI solution where all the pieces are built to fit together very well. Examples of this are the MS BI Suite (with MSSQL Server, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, BIDS, PerformancePoint, Excel etc...) or the Pentaho BI Suite if you like your open source. Other big players in this realm are SAP, Oracle and IBM.
A Dashboard Tool is just one of those components. It doesn't do any massive calculation or ETL function, it's basically a presentation tool. It takes data, and turns it into pretty information.
Some examples are PerformancePoint, MicroStrategy.
tldr: BI Platform is for full stack, E2E BI development, Dashboard Tools are just for presenting data and making pretty dashboards.
Everything about the BI Platform described by mwan is correct.
Although have to disagree with the dashboard description.
It is more than presenting data into pretty dashboards.
Useful dashboards also provide the interface so they behave like webapps.
Users click on controls and data changes ->queries are fired in the background ->results get updated. And there is also the concept of drill into mechanism where a click on a dashboard takes the data and provides a context to a child query or another dashboard.
