Introduction to Business Intelligence

Business intelligence begin to evolve in 1990's. Business intelligence is now a mature field. Mature in this context means that there are a core set of products and services offered by vendors.

"Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart".

- Wikipedia (Business intelligence tools)

The key general categories of business intelligence tools are (Wikipedia Business intelligence tools):

• Spreadsheets
• Reporting and querying software - are tools that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data
• OLAP
• Digital Dashboards
• Data mining
• Process mining
• Business performance management

Each tool can be sold in a variety of ways, include as standalone tools, within a suite of tools, as components of software targeted to a specific industry, within a web-based Business Intelligence 2.0 infrastructure, or packaged into data warehouse appliances.

The most important development in the vendor space is acquisitions. The recent trend in the marketplace is for larger companies to acquire smaller companies. This has consolidated the BI market share. The largest include:

• 2008 - IBM purchases Cognos for $5 billion
• 2008 - SAP purchases Business Objects for € 4.8 billion
• 2007 - Oracle purchases Hyperion for $3.3 billion

Note that a few business intelligence vendors own a substantial share of the market. The following figure shows market share by vendor between 2006 and 2007.

BI Market Share by Vendor (revenue in millions of U.S. dollars)