Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to various skills, technologies and practices that are used to support business decision making, therefore also called as decision support system.

According to the leading research firm, Gartner that open-source BI tools production deployments will grow five-fold through 2012. The research firm also added that the open-source BI tool deployment is growing solidly.

According to various analysts, an effective and integrated BI solution can improve business performance by having better decision making across the company. At present, various large houses like Microsoft, Oracle (Hyperion), IBM (Cognos), and SAP (Business Objects) offer BI solutions to achieve the success and better Return on Investments (ROI).

Why Business intelligence Solutions required?

Business Intelligence helps its users in various tasks like –

1. To know your customers better
2. To look and evaluate the competition in the market
3. Help you to accommodate with your business partners better
4. Process information regarding economic efficiency and ROI
5. It also helps you in decision making for your internal operations.

Leading vendors for providing next generation BI solutions are –

SAP – Business Objects

Business Objects, which is now owned by SAP, provides one of the extensive BI product ranges. The BI solution from the company is called as SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence (SAP BI).   The solution helps its consumers to extract data from a specific source, applying transformation rules, and loading it into the Data Warehouse Area. Also it helps the companies to run simulations and cost calculations.

IBM – Cognos

Similar to Business Objects, Cognos is now owned by IBM and developed a business tool for handling intelligence that is used by thousands of companies in 135 countries. The software tool is known as IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, which combines all the jobs of good performance management viz. reporting, analysis, grading, data integration, event management, dashboards, etc. According to the company, with its BI solutions organizations will find an opportunity to make better decisions faster.

Microsoft BI solutions

The software giant did not make any huge BI purchases in recent years like other IT giants; however, the company had acquired ProClarity Corp in 2006. Microsoft BI solutions can help various organizations quickly access the timely, relevant, and accurate information for better decision making. It also saves money, provide real time information and removes inefficiencies. However, various analysts suggest that the Redmond giant still lags behind pure-play vendors in terms of metadata management, reporting and ad hoc query capabilities.

Oracle  Hyperion

Oracle had acquired Hyperion in 2007 for $3. 3 billion. The company claimed to be a leader in EPM, unifying Performance Management and BI solutions, and it will support a broad range of strategic, financial and operational management processes. Oracle BI Apps or Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) offers firms to achieve management excellence – being smart, agile and aligned.

HP- BI services

Although, Hewlett Packard claims to be a BI vendor, but analysts suggest that they are still waiting for HP to actually deliver a BI solution set. In last two-three years, the top four BI vendors had acquired smaller vendors to excel in the field, but the worldâ????s largest technology giant has still to acquire a small BI solutions provider to become in top 5 vendors.