Business intelligence tools

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.

The development of business intelligence software can be traced back to 1865. This was the year when Professor Richard Miller Devens coined the term ‘business intelligence’ referring to common reminiscent between bankers’ decision making in his book ‘Cyclopaedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes’. The same term is used nowadays for all corporate data-related analytic processes.

It took more than 150 years for business intelligence to become a separate scientific process embraced by entrepreneurs and develop the methods it offers nowadays. In its initial form, this analytic concept was laid down by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn in his 1958 IBM Journal article titled ‘A Business Intelligence System'. Luhn is also known as the inventor of Key Word in Context (KWIC) indexing, whose work marked the efforts to make business statistics more understandable for non-expert users.

The first comprehensive business intelligence systems were developed by IBM and Siebel (currently acquired by Oracle) in the period between 1970 and 1990. At the same time, small developer teams were emerging with attractive ideas, and pushing out some of the products companies still use nowadays.

In 1988, specialists and vendors organized a Multiway Data Analysis Consortium in Rome, where they considered making data management and analytics more efficient, and foremost available to smaller and financially restricted businesses. By 2000, there were many professional reporting systems and analytic programs, some owned by top performing software producers in the United States of America.

In the years after 2000, business intelligence software producers became interested in producing universally applicable BI systems which don’t require expensive installation, and could hence be considered by smaller and midmarket businesses which could not afford on premise maintenance. These aspirations emerged in parallel with the cloud hosting trend, which is how most vendors came to develop independent systems with unrestricted access to information.

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Wikipedia