What is Business Intelligence?

Business Ingelligence (BI) - technology infrastructure for gaining maximum information from available data for the purpose of improving business processes. Typical BI infrastructure components are as follows: software solution for gathering, cleansing, integrating, analyzing and sharing data. Business Intelligence produces analysis and provides believable information to help making effective and high quality business decisions.

The most common kinds of Business Intelligence systems are:

EIS - Executive Information Systems

DSS - Decision Support Systems

MIS - Management Information Systems

GIS - Geographic Information Systems

OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Business Intelligence systems based on Data Warehouse technology. A Data Warehouse(DW) gathers information from a wide range of company's operational systems, Business Intelligence systems based on it. Data loaded to DW is usually good integrated and cleaned that allows to produce credible information which reflected so called 'one version of the true'. 

List of BI tools in the market :

1. SAP BusinessObjects: a complete BI platform
2. IBM Cognos Series 10: strong in analytics
3. JasperSoft: open source, now TIBCO
4. Microsoft BI tools: a complete BI platform
5. MicroStrategy: strong in reporting & performance
6. Oracle BI (OBIEE): a complete BI platform
7. Oracle Hyperion System: tool for consolidation
8. Pentaho BI: open source, now HDS
9. Yellowfin BI: strong in dashboards
10. Qlik: strong in Data Discovery
11. SAP NetWeaver BW: data warehouse + cubes
12. SAS BI: very strong in analytics
13. Style Intelligence: a niche player
14. Tableau Software: strong in Data Visualization
15. WebFOCUS: a complete BI platform
16. BizzScore: strong in performance management
17. Board: strong in performance management
18. Birst: a complete BI platform in the cloud