According to Gartner, open-source BI tools 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 faster.

The Leading vendors in BI solutions are:
1. SAP – Business Objects
Business Object that recently take over 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.

2. IBM – Cognos,
Cognos similar to Business Object that had been bought by big company, Cognos 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 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.

3. Microsoft BI solutions
Microsoft BI solutions based on ProClarity system that bought by microsoft in 2006, It 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.

4. Oracle – Hyperion
Oracle had acquired Hyperion to expand their BI solution. 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.

5. HP – BI services
In last two-three years, the top four BI vendors had acquired smaller vendors to excel in the field.Similar Posts:

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Before considering building your own reporting tools or buying a new one, here are a few questions that you should consider

• How many reports will be made ? If your organization is planning on producing plenty of report, you might consider investing th
  

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  e budget on business intelligence reporting tools as creating the report application manually one by one could take a long time.

• How will the report be distributed ? If the executives in your organization has a different preference of consuming the report (web based, SMS alerts, email delivery etc.), it’ will consume a lot of resource to build reports for each of the distribution method
• Will the users will be able to create their own custom made report easily ? If the report end user are likely to able to create and alter the report tailor-made for their consumption,  then you should consider purchasing a flexible reporting system rather than building different report for different users which basically shows the same data.

Must Have Features Of Business Intelligence Reporting Tools

The report presentation is as important as managing the data in the data warehouse itself. Therefore you should pay attention to the following points when evaluating business intelligence reporting tools:

• Data source connection capabilities : The reporting tools must have the feature to be able to connect to various types of data source since it is easy to assume that the reporting source will come from aggregation of various source of data.
  
• Scheduling and distribution capabilities: With the scheduling and distribution feature, executive users will be able to flexibly consume the report in a timely fashion and will be able to make critical business decisions accordingly.
  
• Security Features: Security is an important issue in almost every software application, including reporting tools. You don’t want unauthorized access to important business intelligence reports in your organization do you ?
  

• Customization: Flexibility is another plus feature in current business intelligence reporting tools. Many executive users will expect the data presentation will match accordingly to their preference.
• Export capabilities: Many report users don’t consume the report data as it is. Most likely they will export it to another format (PDF, Excel and/or other Office supported formats) which then will be used for their work.
  

Popular Business Intelligence Reporting Tools We’ve Covered

• Pentaho : Open Source Business Intelligence

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• Pentaho as Open Source Business Intelligence
• What is Business Intelligence?

Pentaho is an open-source reporting application, with several enterprise capabilities such as chart generation, dashboards, data mining, and pivot table analysis. Pentaho is a 100% Java application, based on the JBOSS application server and JBOSS Portal for advanced user customization of dashboards.

Pentaho also uses several other open-source components, such as:

JFreeChart for chart generation

JFreeReport and JasperReport for reporting

JPivot for pivot table analysis

Kettle for ETL

Mondrian as an OLAP server

Quartz as a job scheduler

By using these products, Pentahoe gives a lot of choices for implementation in an enterprise environment.

Pentaho can be used as a standalone application or embedded into your application.

Standalone Application

Standalone includes integrated distribution includes the Pentaho code and a customized JBoss application server, a JBOSS Portal instance, and a built-in HSQL database. This distribution focuses on ease of use and out-of-the-box experience. To try the distribution, just download, unpack, start the application server, and point the browser to the default page. After completing these steps, you will have a complete, working reporting server.To create and edit reports, Pentaho uses another industry standard like Eclipse as an IDE for its Pentaho Design Studio. The Pentaho Design Studio provides an easy-to-use environment for generating new reports and Action Sequence components.The latest Pentaho stable release is 1.2 and the development version is 1.5.2. To learn more about Pentaho and its features refer the website at www.pentaho.org.In this chapter, we’ll cover the basics of installing and integrating Pentaho with our OSWorkflow Workflow instance database to create graphical charts that help the decision making process as well as the monitoring of business processes.

Embedded Application

Enbedded application includes pentaho in the application different application, such as CRM application or ERP application.

Pentaho Business Intelligence Requirements

Pentaho is a complex Java system, requiring a J2EE application server, thus the memory consumption is huge. If you want to edit the Pentaho components simultaneously, you need to have at least 1 GB of RAM in your system. If you don’t have this amount, you’ll have to alternate between editing and testing. Pentaho needs at least Java version 5 to run.

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• Business Intelligence Reporting Tools
• What is Business Intelligence?

OLAP : System used to change data stored in data warehouse transform the data to multi dimensional structure or cube.

Type of OLAP

• Relational OLAP: Extended RDBMS with multidimensional data mapping to standard relational operation.
• Multidimensional OLAP: Implemented operation in multidimensional data.
• Hybrid OLAP: Could use different partition that will be used.

OLAP Data Warehouse Query

• Roll-up : display data that increase in aggregation level
• Drill-down : display details using query for dimension table hierarchy
• Pivot : makes cross tabulation
• Slice and dice: Makes range selection on one or more dimension.

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Business Intelligence (also known as BI) is big business. In a recent report market analyst Datamonitor predicts business intelligence spend by retail banking in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, will increase around 60.7%, from $5.6 billion in 2006 to $9 billion by 2012.

So what is business intelligence, and why would you even need it?
As is typical in the IT industry ‘Business Intelligence’ is means something slightly different to everyone. So I have come up with my own definition of BI. Here it is:

Business Intelligence is a system which enables organisations to collect, analyse and present business information to support business decisions.

Business Intelligence
BI is not a collection of diverse tools you put together and ‘hope for the best’. If you want to get good results you need to plan from the start. Don’t be dazzled by the impressive offerings of the software giants. Have a clear picture from the start of what you want to get from BI, and how you plan to get there, and your chances of getting real value from Business Intelligence multiply greatly.

One thing that differentiates BI systems from traditional systems like inventory, distribution and finance systems is flexibility – the ability to add measures and outputs as your organisation and its use of BI develop. But this flexibility does not excuse you from the planning stages – in fact it increases the need for planning.

Unlike many traditional computer systems, a single BI system can provide value to all departments within your organisation, but as with any system it is important not to expect delivery on everything at the same time. Build steadily, working down your priority list.

Data Collection
The first question you might ask is “why do I have to collect information I already have in my database”? The answer is, you probably don’t have it already. You might have some of the information you need, and even then it is probably not in the exact form you need it. Much of the other information you need is probably on spreadsheets on various peoples’ desks, or doesn’t exist at all and has to be collected.

Even if you have all the information you need already (which is unlikely) it is a good idea for the BI system to store it somewhere else. That way the data can be organised and aggregated to make it work quickly and efficiently in a BI system. Often you need to add history to your BI database, which may not be kept in your existing transactional systems.

The most popular way to collect the data is in a specially-designed data warehouse. It takes time and skill to develop a good data warehouse, but in most cases it is vital to an effective BI implementation. A good data warehouse need not be a huge, complex beast – the simpler the design, the lower the cost, and the more chance of success.

A good data warehouse design can be easily extended to allow for unforeseen business reporting requirements.

Using BI
Generally speaking, data is best suited to BI reporting when it is

1. summarised, and
2. organised in hierarchies

In large organisations with large amounts of data this number-crunching process can require millions of calculations and is often carried out overnight on a daily basis. Calculations, sometimes between quite diversely held data elements, allow you to create specific ‘key performance indicators’ (KPIs) such as Profit per Customer and Revenue per Employee.

Data held in multidimensional structures known as cubes contain this hierarchical, summarised information which allows managers to analyse KPIs at any level of the organisation – giving them the ability to see, for example, Revenue per Employee at National, Regional and Area levels, by month or summarised at the year level.

Business Information
Presentation of information is a key issue, and should be considered with the nature of the data and also the recipient in mind. Presentation methods in BI are constantly evolving and include:

• Online and printed reports and queries
• Graphs
• Multidimensional cubes
• Dashboards
• Scorecards

Mostly delivery is online but cubes can – depending on the software package used to create them – be taken offline and analysed on a non-networked laptop, for example. Recent features such as email alerts can be vitally important where metrics change rapidly and quick action must be taken to remedy them.

Support Business Decisions
The most common reason for collecting, analysing and presenting KPIs and metrics is to monitor and improve the performance of your organisation. In economic terms you need to get more from your BI system than you put in (ie the benefits should outweigh the costs). If this is not the case you can usually improve the balance by making more use of it, which often means adding more KPIs and users.

Summary
Business Intelligence systems maximise data use by collating the data into useful metrics and KPIs and presenting them effectively. How effective your Business Intelligence system becomes is related to how well it was planned and implemented. A well-implemented BI system can cut costs, improve productivity and make an organisation more competitive. An effective BI strategy is vital to success.Similar Posts:

• Business Intelligence Reporting Tools
• Pentaho as Open Source Business Intelligence