| The terms Business intelligence (BI) and Information | | | | • More Sophisticated, Interactive Graphics for |
| Applications are often used interchangeably to refer to | | | | Online Information Visualization - Google, Amazon, and |
| the broad category of technologies for consolidating, | | | | Yahoo were changing user expectations for what |
| reporting and analyzing enterprise data to help | | | | information looks like on the Web and now, with the |
| enterprise users make better business decisions. BI or | | | | advent of Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications, the |
| Information applications span the spectrum of ETL | | | | expectation for that information was to be highly |
| (Extract-Transform and Load) tools, the activities of | | | | interactive. |
| decision support systems, query and reporting, online | | | | • Web Design Metaphor - The process of |
| analytical processing (OLAP), statistical and predictive | | | | designing web pages was creating a new standard in |
| analysis, in-memory data manipulation and | | | | how to lay out and develop documents. This new |
| performance management tools and applications. | | | | community of developers needed an alternative to the |
| Business intelligence applications can be internal which | | | | traditional banded-report writers. |
| include applications such as customer intelligence, | | | | • Open Source - Open source was emerging as a |
| expense and budgeting, HR or outside the firewall | | | | method of developing, distributing and licensing |
| which are self-service applications designed for | | | | software in order to achieve the innovation, |
| customers and partners or suppliers. Over the last | | | | accelerated development cycle and |
| decade, BI applications have helped organizations | | | | market-demanded feature-set created due to the |
| consolidate and analyze mission-critical information | | | | participation of a community of developers. |
| integral to an enterprise's operations and have become | | | | These products add Flash visualizations into |
| the central source of truth driven by user demand. | | | | applications developed using BIRT open source |
| Innovative companies recognize the limitations of the | | | | reporting, improve the user's experience viewing and |
| traditional enterprise BI model and made a strategic | | | | interacting with BIRT web pages, supply |
| commitment to open source for the future of its | | | | special-purpose data access approaches, add |
| product-line. Open source technology was the key to | | | | scheduling, security, document management and finally |
| responding to three significant trends that were | | | | reliability, performance and scalability features for |
| emerging in the BI industry due to user demands: | | | | enterprise implementations. |