Business intelligence software is a type of

application software Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical ...

. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...

or data mart.

History

Development of business intelligence software

The first comprehensive business intelligence systems were developed by IBM and

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(currently acquired by

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

) in the period between 1970 and 1990. At the same time, small developer teams were emerging with attractive ideas, and pushing out some of the products companies still use nowadays. In 1988, specialists and vendors organized a Multiway Data Analysis Consortium in

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, where they considered making data management and analytics more efficient, and foremost available to smaller and financially restricted businesses. By 2000, there were many professional reporting systems and analytic programs, some owned by top performing software producers in the

United States of America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...

Cloud-hosted business intelligence software

In the years after 2000, business intelligence software producers became interested in producing universally applicable BI systems which don’t require expensive installation, and could hence be considered by smaller and midmarket businesses which could not afford on premise maintenance. These aspirations emerged in parallel with the cloud hosting trend, which is how most vendors came to develop independent systems with unrestricted access to information. From 2006 onwards, the positive effects of cloud-stored information and data management transformed itself to a completely mobile-affectioned one, mostly to the benefit of decentralized and remote teams looking to tweak data or gain full visibility over it out of office. As a response to the large success of fully optimized uni-browser versions, vendors have recently begun releasing mobile-specific product applications for both Android and iOS users. Cloud-hosted data analytics made it possible for companies to categorize and process large volumes of data, which is how we can currently speak of unlimited visualization, and intelligent decision making.

Types

The key general categories of business intelligence applications are: * Spreadsheets * Reporting and querying software: applications that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data *

Online analytical processing Online analytical processing, or OLAP (), is an approach to answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries swiftly in computing. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational databases, repor ...

(OLAP) * Digital dashboards * Data mining *

Business activity monitoring Business activity monitoring (BAM) is software that aids the monitoring of business activities which are implemented in computer systems. The term was originally coined by analysts at Gartner, Inc. and refers to the aggregation, analysis, and p ...

Data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...

* Local information systems *

Data cleansing Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the d ...

Exploring Data Analysis
Published by Spotless Data Retrieved 15 May, 2017] Except for spreadsheets, these tools are provided as standalone applications, suites of applications, components of

Enterprise resource planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a sui ...

systems,

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

s or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.

Open source free products

* Apache Hive, hosted by the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

BIRT Project The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an open source software project that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for rich client and web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. B ...

, by the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

D3.js D3.js (also known as D3, short for Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), HTML5, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) sta ...

KNIME KNIME (), the Konstanz Information Miner, is a free and open-source data analytics, reporting and integration platform. KNIME integrates various components for machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining "Building Blocks ...

* Orange *

Pentaho Pentaho is business intelligence (BI) software that provides data integration, OLAP services, reporting, information dashboards, data mining and extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities. Its headquarters are in Orlando, Florida. Pentaho was ...

* R *

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Grafana Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. A licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional ...

Open source commercial products

* JasperReports: reporting, analysis, dashboard *

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: OLAP server, worksheet server and ETL server *

: reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities *

: reporting, management, dashboard, data mining and integration, workflow capabilities

Proprietary free products

* Biml - Business Intelligence Markup Language *

Datacopia Datacopia is a freemium tool that automatically generates charts and infographics from structured and unstructured data. Context Representing data using charts is a difficult task from two perspectives. The first is that it is not always cle ...

* icCube * InetSoft *

Splunk Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface. Its software helps capture, index and correlat ...

Proprietary products

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Business Intelligence Tools Business intelligence Business software