Crystal Analysis (a.k.a. Crystal Analysis Professional) is an On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) application for analysing business data originally developed by Seagate Software.
It was first released under the name Seagate Analysis as a free application written in Java released in 1999. After disappointing application performance, a decision was made to rewrite using ATL COM in C++. The initial rewrite only supported Microsoft Analysis Services, but support for other vendors soon followed, with Holos cubes in version 8.5, Essbase, IBM Db2 and SAP BW following in later releases. The web client was rewritten using an XSLT abstraction layer for the version 9.0 release, with better standards compliance to support Mozilla based browsers, this work also set the building blocks for support for Safari.
Crystal Analysis relies on Crystal Enterprise for distribution of analytical applications created with it.
Future versions will be released under the name, BusinessObjects OLAP Intelligence .
In computing, a data warehouse, 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. Data warehouses are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating reports. This is beneficial for companies as it enables them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions.
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the 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.
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e., unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
SAS is a statistical software suite developed by SAS Institute for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, criminal investigation, and predictive analytics. SAS' analytical software is built upon artificial intelligence and utilizes machine learning, deep learning and generative AI to manage and model data.
Business Objects was an enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence (BI). Business Objects was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers in its final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP. Its flagship product was BusinessObjects XI, with components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, as well as enterprise information management. Business Objects also offered consulting and education services to help customers deploy its business intelligence projects. Other toolsets enabled universes and ready-written reports to be stored centrally and made selectively available to communities of the users.
Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application marketed to small- and medium-sized businesses by SAP.
Crystal Decisions was a company that was known for its business intelligence products.
Holos was an influential OLAP product of the 1990s. Developed by Holistic Systems in 1987, the product remained in use until around 2004. The core of the Holos Server was a business intelligence (BI) virtual machine. The Holos Language was a very broad language in that it covered a wide range of statements and concepts, including the reporting system, business rules, OLAP data, SQL data, device properties, analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Holos Server provided an array of different, but compatible, storage mechanisms for its multi-cube architecture: memory, disk, SQL. It was therefore the first product to provide "hybrid OLAP" (HOLAP). The Holos Client was both a design and delivery vehicle, and this made it quite large. Around about 2000, the Holos Language was made object-oriented (HL++) with a view to allowing the replacement of the Holos Client with a custom Java or VB product. However, the company were never sold on this, and so the project was abandoned. Before its demise, the Holos Server product ran under Windows NT, VMS, plus about 10 flavors of UNIX, and accessed over half-a-dozen different SQL databases. It was also ported to several different locales, including Japanese.
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.
A pivot table is a table of values which are aggregations of groups of individual values from a more extensive table within one or more discrete categories. The aggregations or summaries of the groups of the individual terms might include sums, averages, counts, or other statistics. A pivot table is the outcome of the statistical processing of tabularized raw data and can be used for decision-making.
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is an online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining tool in Microsoft SQL Server. SSAS is used as a tool by organizations to analyze and make sense of information possibly spread out across multiple databases, or in disparate tables or files. Microsoft has included a number of services in SQL Server related to business intelligence and data warehousing. These services include Integration Services, Reporting Services and Analysis Services. Analysis Services includes a group of OLAP and data mining capabilities and comes in two flavors multidimensional and tabular, where the difference between the two is how the data is presented. In a tabular model, the information is arranged in two-dimensional tables which can thus be more readable for a human. A multidimensional model can contain information with many degrees of freedom, and must be unfolded to increase readability by a human.
Unstructured data is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. This results in irregularities and ambiguities that make it difficult to understand using traditional programs as compared to data stored in fielded form in databases or annotated in documents.
Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.
Simba Technologies Inc. is a software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Simba specializes in products for ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) and XML for Analysis (XMLA). The company licenses data connectivity technologies, and provides software development for Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac and mobile device platforms. Simba Technologies was founded as PageAhead Software in Vancouver and Seattle, Washington in 1991 and changed its name in 1995. Customers include Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, MIS AG, SAP AG and Descisys.
RCA Open-Source Application (ROSA) is an open-source management accounting application that aims to provide decision-support information to managers. Resource consumption accounting (RCA) is a principle-based approach to management accounting that combines German management accounting techniques known as Grenzplankostenrechnung (GPK) with a disciplined form of activity-based costing.
SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. Its primary function as the software running a database server is to store and retrieve data as requested by the applications. In addition, it performs advanced analytics and includes extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities as well as an application server.
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.
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.