The terms business intelligence (BI) and information applications are often used interchangeably to refer to the broad category of technologies for consolidating, reporting, and analyzing business data to help business users make better business decisions. Information or BI applications span the spectrum of ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools, activities of decision support systems, queries and reports, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical and predictive analysis, data manipulation in memory and performance management tools. and applications.
Business intelligence applications can be internal, which include applications such as customer intelligence, budgeting and spending, human resources, or outside the firewall, which are self-service applications designed for customers and partners or vendors. Over the past decade, BI applications have helped organizations consolidate and analyze mission-critical information integral to a company’s operations and have become the central source of truth driven by user demand.
Innovative companies recognize the limitations of the traditional enterprise BI model and have strategically committed to open source for the future of their product line. Open source technology was the key to responding to three important trends that were emerging in the BI industry due to user demands:
• More sophisticated interactive graphics for displaying information online: Google, Amazon, and Yahoo were changing user expectations about how information looks on the Web and now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications , the expectation that the information was to be highly interactive.
• Web design metaphor: The web design process was creating a new standard in the way documents were designed and developed. This new community of developers needed an alternative to traditional raid report writers.
• Open Source: Open Source was emerging as a software development, distribution, and licensing method to achieve innovation, accelerated development cycle, and market-demanded feature set created through the participation of a community of developers.
These products add Flash visualizations to applications built with BIRT open source reporting, enhance the user experience of viewing and interacting with BIRT web pages, provide special-purpose data access approaches, add scheduling, security, document management; and finally, reliability, performance, and scalability features for enterprise deployments.