What do you use to analyze your data?

Do you have an on premise solution that you download your Salesforce.com data to?  Or do you use a company like Business Objects or LucidEra (who, apparently is closing very soon)?  Or do you use Salesforce.com's wonderful internal analytics?

Though the funnel chart introduced in the Summer '09 release is cool, it really doesn't give you the ability to do any complex analysis.  As a dashboard chart, it's nice to be able to see in bold colors where the numbers are, but if you really want to know where your big deals are, who is (or isn't) following up on their opportunities, etc., you need a BI package.

SaaS BI vendors like Business Objects and LucidEra connect directly to your Salesforce.com data and allow you to do analysis, but sometimes don't give you the flexibility that an on premise BI solution can provide.  Of course, one of the trade offs is how do you get your data into your BI solution if it's on premise?  Can it connect over the internet?  What's the performance like?

There are several vendors that offer tools to get your Salesforce.com data local.  This has some side benefits as well.  Have you ever had a user run up to you and say, "Can you help me? I just deleted my contact?"  And then, when you teach them how to use the recycle bin, they admit that they didn't delete the WHOLE contact, just some of the contact information.  If you have a local copy of the data, just do a query, get the info and update the data.  Handy, no? 

My favorite tool for this is DBAmp from ForceAmp.  Not only is it a simple application to install, the support is great (and it's not that pricey).  It allows your Salesforce.com organization to appear as a "Linked Server" to Microsoft SQL server.  This allows you to not only copy your data locally, but even update it (I can hear the DBAs salivating about writing stored procedures to do all sorts of fun stuff with their data).  Of course, there are other tools out there for this like Cast Iron and Pervasive that allow you do it with a point and a click, but they'll cost you.

Now that your data is local, what are you going to do with it?  Well... I'm going to toot my own horn here, I don't do it that often, so if it offends you, skip this paragraph.  We use our own product here at Tableau Software to analyze our Salesforce.com data.  Chris Stolte, one of our founders, wrote an awesome blog post about it a while back.  I love to use Tableau to make pivot tables and slice up our data to find specific data or groups of records that I need to get to.  We even use it to generate lists of ids to update using Demand Tools.

So, again, what do you use to look at your data?