Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence (BI). The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.
The first comprehensive business intelligence systems were developed by IBM and Siebel (currently acquired by Oracle) in the period between 1970 and 1990. [1] [2] At the same time, small developer teams were emerging with attractive ideas, and pushing out some of the products companies still use nowadays. [3]
In 1988, specialists and vendors organized a Multiway Data Analysis Consortium in Rome, 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. [4]
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. [5]
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. [6] 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.
The key general categories of business intelligence applications are:
Except for spreadsheets, these tools are provided as standalone applications, suites of applications, components of Enterprise resource planning systems, application programming interfaces or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.
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 reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.
In computing, online analytical processing, or 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 processing (OLTP). OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational databases, report writing and data mining. Typical applications of OLAP include business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications emerging, such as agriculture.
Essbase is a multidimensional database management system (MDBMS) that provides a platform upon which to build analytic applications. Essbase began as a product from Arbor Software, which merged with Hyperion Software in 1998. Oracle Corporation acquired Hyperion Solutions Corporation in 2007. Until late 2005 IBM also marketed an OEM version of Essbase as DB2 OLAP Server.
Hyperion Solutions Corporation was a software company located in Santa Clara, California, which was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2007. Many of its products were targeted at the business intelligence (BI) and business performance management markets, and as of 2013 were developed and sold as Oracle Hyperion products. Hyperion Solutions was formed from the merger of Hyperion Software and Arbor Software in 1998.
IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1 is a business performance management software suite designed to implement collaborative planning, budgeting and forecasting solutions, interactive "what-if" analyses, as well as analytical and reporting applications.
Panorama Software is a Canadian software and consulting company specializing in business intelligence. The company was founded by Rony Ross in Israel in 1993; it relocated its headquarters to Toronto, Canada in 2003. Panorama sold its online analytical processing (OLAP) technology to Microsoft in 1996, which was built into Microsoft OLAP Services and later SQL Server Analysis Services, an integrated component of Microsoft SQL Server.
Panopticon Software was a multi-national data visualization software company specializing in monitoring and analysis of real-time data. The firm was headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. It partnered with software companies, including SAP, Thomson Reuters, Kx Systems, and One Market Data (OneTick). The company's name is derived from the Greek: 'pan' for all, 'optic' for sight. The company name is derived from the word panopticon which is an architectural concept originally intended to facilitate surveillance of prisons.
Qlik [pronounced "klik"] provides a data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence platform. The software company was founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden and is now based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, United States. Thoma Bravo made the company private in 2016.
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus, also termed as the OBI EE Plus, is Oracle Corporation's set of business intelligence tools consisting of former Siebel Systems business intelligence and Hyperion Solutions business intelligence offerings.
InetSoft Technology Corporation is a privately owned multinational computer software company that develops free and commercial web-based business intelligence applications. The company was founded in 1996, and currently has over 120 employees between its corporate headquarters in Piscataway, New Jersey, and development offices in Beijing and Xi'an, China.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of online analytical processing (OLAP) servers. Please see the individual products articles for further information.
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.
CubePort is a commercial software application that converts from Oracle Essbase to the analogous Microsoft product Microsoft Analysis Services, which is built into Microsoft SQL Server. This application achieves this through various analogy mapping techniques, and is a standard client-server application that runs on a Windows computer but may connect to non-Windows servers. CubePort converts the various OLAP structures and syntaxes in the source through an extraction process, interprets, and recreates in the target. The objective is to simulate exactly the behavior of the original source system to the target system.
IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson is a web-based integrated business intelligence suite by IBM. It provides a toolset for reporting, analytics, scorecarding, and monitoring of events and metrics. The software consists of several components designed to meet the different information requirements in a company. IBM Cognos Analytics has components such as IBM Cognos Framework Manager, IBM Cognos Cube Designer, IBM Cognos Transformer.
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product which forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse company ParAccel, to handle large scale data sets and database migrations. Redshift differs from Amazon's other hosted database offering, Amazon RDS, in its ability to handle analytic workloads on big data data sets stored by a column-oriented DBMS principle. Redshift allows up to 16 petabytes of data on a cluster.
Arcplan is a software for business intelligence (BI), budgeting, planning & forecasting (BP&F), business analytics and collaborative Business Intelligence. It is the enhancement of the enterprise software inSight® and dynaSight of the former German provider arcplan Information Services GmbH.
Logi Analytics, Inc. is a computer software company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, United States with offices in the UK and Ireland. It offers interactive data visualization products for business intelligence and business analytics. On April 7, 2021, Logi Analytics, Inc. was acquired by insightsoftware.
GrayMatter Software is a data science, artificial intelligence, and analytics firm, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka. It was founded in 2006 by Vikas Gupta as a business intelligence consulting firm. Over the years, the company has partnered with SAP, Hitachi Vantara and Qlik for products and services within the airport Industry.
Kyvos is a business intelligence acceleration platform for cloud and big data platforms developed by an American privately held company named Kyvos Insights. The company, headquartered in Los Gatos, California, was founded by Praveen Kankariya, CEO of Impetus Technologies. The software provides OLAP-based multidimensional analysis on big data and cloud platforms and was launched officially in June 2015. In December the same year, the company was listed among the 10 Coolest Big Data Startups of 2015 by CRN Magazine.