Business Intelligence Software and Systems, an Introduction
Business intelligence is a name used for wide class of software applications that provides managers and other knowledge workers with information they need for managing more effectively their organizations (companies, public institutions, schools, hospitals, ngo’s and other). It includes tools for reporting, analysis, OLAP, dashboards, scorecards and others.
This information is important especially for better decision making and planning. It can be structured or not. The highest value information is generally not structured and is very difficult to process with computers. Current business intelligence systems therefore deal mostly with structured information. It is information that can be easily viewed in tables or charts. An example can be certain product sales performance by different regions in time.
The term business intelligence (BI) is most commonly used for formerly executive information system (EIS) used especially by SAS institute, decision support systems (DSS) and management information systems (MIS).
The core of most organizational IT systems nowadays is so called enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The term is not very appropriate, but it became terminus for that class of software applications. ERP applications like SAP, Oracle Financials, Microsoft Dynamics, Baan and others has been collecting and storing large amounts of data with high potential of information that was scarsly leveraged. ERP vendors were not flexible enough to fulfill these needs and the niche was soon dominated by independent suppliers such as SAS Instutute, Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion, Panorama, Aplix, Crystal, Brio and many others. SAP, Oracle and Microsoft tried keeping a pace with them both modes by acquisitions and proper development but no one of them ever become a absolute leader.
Since mid nineties the fiercest competitors in leading reporting and analysis were Cognos and Business Objects and they remained thus until two years ago. In 2007 Gartner estimated global volume of business intelligence market about $ 7 billion with consistent 7% average growth rate per year and the biggest players in IT market decided not to loose the game and this triggered major acquisitions. So Oracle bought Hyperion in spring. In summer SAP acquired Business Objects and finally on November IBM took Cognos.
How does business intelligence look today? Two major fields the BI solutions cover are reporting and analysis.
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business intelligence
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analysis, BSC, business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, dashboarding, data mart, data warehouse, database, dimensions, erp, IBM, KPI, Microsoft, multidimensional, OLAP, Oracle, reporting, SAP, scorecarding
Themocracy
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