Business intelligence tools

Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to help the business intelligence (BI) business processes. Specifically they are generally tools that aid in the analysis, and presentation of data. While some business intelligence tools include ETL functionality, ETL tools are generally not considered business intelligence tools.

Types of business intelligence tools

 * Digital Dashboards - Also known as Business Intelligence Dashboards, Enterprise Dashboards, or Executive Dashboards, these are visually-based summaries of business data that show at-a-glance understanding of business conditions through metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A very popular BI tool that has arisen in the last few years.
 * Online Analytical Processing, commonly known as OLAP (including HOLAP, ROLAP and MOLAP)- a capability of some management, decision support, and executive information systems that supports interactive examination of large amounts of data from many perspectives.
 * Reporting software generates aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of their business.
 * Data mining - extraction of consumer information from a database by utilizing software that can isolate and identify previously unknown patterns or trends in large amounts of data. There are a variety of data mining techniques that reveal different types of patterns. . Some of the techniques that belong here are Statistical methods (particularly Business statistics) and Neural networks as very advanced means of analysing data.
 * Business performance management (BPM)

Open Source & Free Business Intelligence Products

 * Eclipse BIRT Project: Eclipse-based open source reporting for web applications, especially those based on Java EE.
 * OpenI: simple web application that does OLAP reporting
 * Palo (OLAP database): Memory-based OLAP Server (MOLAP) with interface to Microsoft Excel, .NET, PHP, Java and C++
 * Pentaho: enterprise-class reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities
 * RapidMiner (formerly YALE): open-source software for intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery, data mining, predictive analytics, and machine learning useful for business intelligence applications.
 * SpagoBI: a Business Intelligence Free Platform which uses many FOSS tools as analytical engines, integrating them in an infrastructure which offers a cross-operativeness and a consistent vision between Report,OLAP,Data Mining,Dashboard and over the DWH.

Commercial products

 * ACE*COMM
 * Actuate
 * Applix
 * Business Objects
 * Cognos
 * ComArch
 * Dimensional Insight
 * Hyperion Solutions Corporation
 * Information Builders
 * Microsoft Analysis Services
 * Microsoft Excel
 * MicroStrategy
 * Oracle Corporation
 * OutlookSoft
 * Panorama Software
 * Pentaho
 * Pilot Software, Inc.
 * Proclarity
 * Prospero Business Suite
 * QlikTech
 * SAP Business Information Warehouse
 * SAS Institute
 * Siebel Systems
 * Spotfire
 * SPSS
 * Telerik
 * Teradata
 * StatSoft

Business Intelligence Tool Vendor Landscape and Rankings Report

 * Research Paper: IDC Report - "Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2006 Vendor Share" (Released July 2007)