Business intelligence software is a type of

application software Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not operating, administering or programming the computer. An application (app, application program, software application) is any program that can be categorized as ...

designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

(BI). 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 Business intelligence, reporting and data analysis and is a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central Re ...

data mart A data mart is a structure/access pattern specific to ''data warehouse'' environments. The data mart is a subset of the data warehouse that focuses on a specific business line, department, subject area, or team. Whereas data warehouses have an en ...

History

Development of business intelligence software

The first comprehensive business intelligence systems were developed by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and Siebel (currently acquired by

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

) 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

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

, 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 (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguo ...

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 Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

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 A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ce ...

* Reporting and querying software: applications that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data *

Online analytical processing In computing, online analytical processing (OLAP) (), is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. The term ''OLAP'' was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction proces ...

(OLAP) * Digital dashboards *

Data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

Business activity monitoring Business activity monitoring (BAM) is a category of software intended for use in monitoring and tracking business activities. BAM is a term introduced by Gartner, Inc., referring to the collection, analysis, and presentation of real-time inform ...

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

* Local information systems *

Data cleansing Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of identifying and correcting (or removing) corrupt, inaccurate, or irrelevant records from a dataset, table, or database. It involves detecting incomplete, incorrect, or inaccurate parts of the dat ...

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 suit ...

systems,

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

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

data warehouse appliance In computing, the term data warehouse appliance (DWA) was coined by Foster Hinshaw for a database machine architecture for data warehouses (DW) specifically marketed for big data analysis and discovery that is simple to use (not a pre-configuration) ...

Open source free products

Apache Hive Apache Hive is a data warehouse software project. It is built on top of Apache Hadoop for providing data query and analysis. Hive gives an SQL-like Interface (computing), interface to query data stored in various databases and file systems that i ...

, 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. BIRT ...

, by the

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

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) stan ...

JasperReports JasperReports is an open-source software, open source Java (programming language), Java reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as: screen, a printer, into Portable Document Format, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, ...

KNIME KNIME (), the Konstanz Information Miner, is a data analytics, reporting and integrating platform. KNIME integrates various components for machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining "Building Blocks of Analytics" con ...

* Orange *

Pentaho Pentaho is the brand name for several data management software products that make up the Pentaho+ Data Platform. These include Pentaho Data Integration, Pentaho Business Analytics, Pentaho Data Catalog, and Pentaho Data Optimiser. Overview P ...

Superset In mathematics, a set ''A'' is a subset of a set ''B'' if all elements of ''A'' are also elements of ''B''; ''B'' is then a superset of ''A''. It is possible for ''A'' and ''B'' to be equal; if they are unequal, then ''A'' is a proper subset ...

* Grafana

Open source commercial products

: reporting, analysis, dashboard *

Palo Palo may refer to: Places * Palo, Estonia, village in Meremäe Parish, Võru County, Estonia * Palo, Huesca, municipality in the province of Huesca, Spain * Palo, Iowa, United States, a town located within Linn County * Palo Laziale, a location ...

: OLAP server, worksheet server and ETL server *

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

Proprietary free products

* Biml - Business Intelligence Markup Language * 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 correlate re ...

Proprietary products

References

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