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 have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart.
Business intelligence is a broad set of applications, technologies and knowledge for gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of helping users make better business decisions.
The main challenge of Business Intelligence is to gather and serve organized information regarding all relevant factors that drive the business and enable end-users to access that knowledge easily and efficiently and in effect maximize the success of an organization.
Business intelligence produces analysis and provides in depth knowledge about performance indicators such as company’s customers, competitors, business counterparts, economic environment and internal operations to help making effective and good quality business decisions.
From a technical standpoint, the most important areas that Business Intelligence (BI) covers are:
1 DW – Data warehousing – architecture, modeling, managing, processing
2 ETL process and data integration
3 Reporting, Information visualization and Dashboards
4 OLAP – Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis
5 Data cleansing and data quality management
6 Performance management
7 Data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting
8 MIS – Management Information Systems
9 CRM – Customer Relationship Management
Etl Tools Info portal
ETL Tools portal provides information about different business intelligence tools and datawarehousing solutions, with a main focus on ETL process and tools.
ETL tools
List of the most popular ETL tools:
1 Informatica – Power Center
2 IBM – Websphere DataStage(Formerly known as Ascential DataStage)
3 SAP – BusinessObjects Data Integrator
4 IBM – Cognos Data Manager (Formerly known as Cognos DecisionStream)
5 Microsoft – SQL Server Integration Services
6 Oracle – Data Integrator (Formerly known as Sunopsis Data Conductor)
7 SAS – Data Integration Studio
8 Oracle – Warehouse Builder
9 AB Initio
10 Information Builders – Data Migrator
11 Pentaho – Pentaho Data Integration
12 Embarcadero Technologies – DT/Studio
13 IKAN – ETL4ALL
14 IBM – DB2 Warehouse Edition
15 Pervasive – Data Integrator
16 ETL Solutions Ltd. – Transformation Manager
17 Group 1 Software (Sagent) – DataFlow
18 Sybase – Data Integrated Suite ETL
19 Talend – Talend Open Studio
20 Expressor Software – Expressor Semantic Data Integration System
21 Elixir – Elixir Repertoire
22 OpenSys – CloverETL
Business Intelligence refers to a set of methods and techniques that are used by organizations for tactical and strategic decision making. It leverages technologies that focus on counts, statistics and business objectives to improve business performance.
A Data Warehouse (DW) is simply a consolidation of data from a variety of sources that is designed to support strategic and tactical decision making. Its main purpose is to provide a coherent picture of the business at a point in time. Using various Data Warehousing toolsets, users are able to run online queries and ‘mine” their data.
Many successful companies have been investing large sums of money in business intelligence and data warehousing tools and technologies. They believe that up-to-date, accurate and integrated information about their supply chain, products and customers are critical for their very survival.
This website introduces some key Data Warehousing concepts and terminology. It explains Data Warehousing from a historical context and discusses the underlying business and technology drivers that are making Data Warehouses a hot commodity. The site also provides guidance regarding how you can proceed with this emerging technology.