The first integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System in the industry is provided by Oracle Business Intelligence (BI), a portfolio of technologies and applications that includes category-leading financial performance management applications, operational BI applications, and data warehousing, in addition to the BI foundation and tools, which include an integrated array of query, reporting, analysis, alerting, mobile analytics, data integration and management, and desktop integration.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite

The foundation of the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus platform is a true BI server that is designed to be highly scalable, optimizing concurrency and parallelism to make the value of BI applications available to the largest possible audience. It provides centralized data access and calculation, essentially creating a large pipe through which anyone can consume any information in any form anywhere in the enterprise.

The BI server is central to all of the business processes that consume information, including dashboards, ad hoc queries, intelligent interaction capabilities, enterprise and production reporting, financial reporting, OLAP analysis, data mining, and other Web Service-based applications (J2EE and .NET). All of these applications require rich access to broad sets of data across the enterprise, and they all require a sophisticated calculation and aggregation infrastructure that the platform provides to deliver value.

The platform supports a full complement of access, analysis, and information delivery options, all in one fully integrated Web environment. Each of these components serves different audiences in the organization who have different appetites for the same underlying data but need to access it in different ways. But unlike other BI tools, all components are integrated into one common architecture, enabling a seamless and intuitive user experience.

Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards provide any knowledge worker with intuitive, interactive access to information that is actionable and dynamically personalized based on the individual’s role and identity. In the Oracle BI Intelligence Dashboards environment, the end user is working with live reports, prompts, charts, tables, pivot tables, graphics, and tickers in a pure Web architecture. The user has full capability for drilling, navigating, modifying, and interacting with these results. Oracle BI Intelligence Dashboards can also aggregate content from a wide variety of other sources, including the Internet, shared file servers, and document repositories.

Oracle BI Answers provides true end-user ad hoc capabilities in a pure Web architecture. Users interact with a logical view of the information—completely hidden from data structure complexity while simultaneously preventing runaway queries—and can easily create charts, pivot tables, reports, and visually appealing dashboards, all of which are fully interactive and drillable and can be saved, shared, modified, formatted, or embedded in the user’s personalized Oracle BI Intelligence Dashboards. The results are new levels of business user self-sufficiency in an environment that is fully secure and controlled by IT.

Oracle BI Delivers is a proactive intelligence solution that provides business activity monitoring and alerting that can reach users via multiple channels such as email, dashboards, and mobile devices. Oracle BI Delivers includes a full Web-based self-service alert creation and subscription portal. This next-generation product can initiate and pass contextual information to other alerts to execute a multistep, multiperson, and multiapplication analytical workflow. Furthermore, it can dynamically determine recipients and personalized content to reach the right users at the right time with the right information.

Oracle BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher) offers efficient; scalable reporting solution available for complex, distributed environments. It provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and business partners – both securely and in the right format. Oracle BI Publisher report formats can be designed using Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat – tools most users are already familiar with. Oracle BI Publisher also allows you to bring data in from multiple data sources into a single output document.

Reports can be delivered via printer, e-mail, fax, WebDav, or publish your report to a portal. Oracle BI Publisher can be used as a standalone reporting product or integrated with the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. When used as part of the suite, Oracle BI Publisher leverages common dashboarding, metadata, security, calculation, caching, and intelligent request generation services.

What is Considered a Business Intelligence Tool?

Large volumes of structured and unstructured data are gathered, processed, and analysed by business intelligence tools from both internal and external sources. Documents, photos, emails, movies, books, journals, posts on social media, files, and more can all be considered data sources. BI solutions employ queries to retrieve this data and then display it in ways that are easy for users to understand, like reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs.

Data mining, data visualization, analytics, reporting, predictive analytics, analytics, text mining, and many more tasks can be carried out by the technologies. Employees can use this data to their advantage by using key performance indicators (KPIs), market trends, and predictions to help them make better decisions.

Read Also: Can Python be Used for Business Intelligence?

BI tools can help your business take smart, agile steps toward accomplishing bigger goals. 

Centralized data: All of your data, in one place. Companies collect data from numerous databases, portals, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and more. To make sense of it all, you’ll need business intelligence tools to pool the data together and deliver certain types of views (issues, trends, analytics) based on your queries or what you want to know. 

Self-sufficiency: Data no longer just belongs to your company’s IT team. Now, any employee without technical expertise, even interns, can access and analyze data necessary for their respective teams. They can generate reports on all electronics sales in 2020 or visualize patient records to identify the number of COVID-19 cases in 2022.

Make predictions: With access to so much data from the past and present, employees can make evidence-based decisions. Predictive analytics and forecasting enable users to generate insights based on a product or service’s performance history. If a business condition changes, the intelligent tools can automatically figure out the anomalies and you’ll be able to react to disruptions as they arise. 

Automatic reports: Instead of inputting data manually into Excel spreadsheets or toggling between different tools, many BI tools are automated. If you need a report on a product over a specific period of time, the tool will generate that for you. If that information is significant and you want to add it to a presentation, you can create interactive visualizations and download any charts or graphs you may need. 

Reduces business costs: BI tools can do so much, from analyzing consumer behavior and sales forecasting to real-time process monitoring, that analyzing, planning, and reporting processes are way more efficient and accurate than ever before. In fact, more than 50 percent of BI tools users reported that these benefits helped them reduce costs and increase revenue

Top 5 Business Intelligence Tools

There are numerous BI tools accessible today. These were the most frequently cited websites from the list of websites ranking the best BI tools, thus they were the top five. There is no specific order in which these five BI tools are ranked.

• 1. Microsoft Power BI

One of the most popular BI tools is Power BI, offered by leading software giant Microsoft. This tool is downloadable software, so you can choose to run analytics either on the cloud or in a reporting server. Syncing with sources such as Facebook, Oracle, and more, generate reports and dashboards in minutes with this interactive tool. It comes with built-in AI capabilities, Excel integration, and data connectors, and offers end-to-end data encryption and real-time access monitoring.

In just two hours, you can learn the basics of Power BI Desktop with this guided project. You’ll load and transform data to create interactive reports and dashboards. 

• 2. Tableau

Tableau is known for its user-friendly data visualization capabilities, but it can do more than make pretty charts. Their offering includes live visual analytics, an interface that allows users to drag and drop buttons to spot trends in data quickly. The tool supports data sources such as Microsoft Excel, Box, PDF files, Google Analytics, and more. Its versatility extends to being able to connect with most databases.

There are several options for learning how to use Tableau.

• Data Visualization with Tableau specialization from the University of California Davis
• Use Tableau for Your Data Science Workflow specialization from the University of California Irvine
• Data Visualization and Communication class with Tableau from Duke University
• Guided Project on Visualizing Citibike Trips with Tableau

• 3. QlikSense

QlikSense is a BI tool that emphasizes a self-service approach, meaning that it supports a wide range of analytics use cases, from guided apps and dashboards to custom and embedded analytics. It offers a user-friendly interface optimized for touchscreens, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platforms. Its associative exploration capability, Search & Conversational Analytics, allows users to ask questions and uncover actionable insights, which helps increase data literacy for those new to using BI tools.

• 4. Dundas BI

Dundas BI is a browser-based BI tool that’s been around for 25 years. Like Tableau, Dundas BI features a drag-and-drop function that allows users to analyze data on their own, without involving their IT team. The tool is known for its simplicity and flexibility through interactive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. Since its inception as a data visualization tool in 1992, it has evolved into an end-to-end analytics platform that is able to compete with the new BI tools available today.

• 5. Sisense

Sisense is a user-friendly BI tool that focuses on being simplified and streamlined. With this tool, you can export data from sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more. Its in-chip technology allows for faster data processing compared to other tools. Key features include the ability to embed white-label analytics, meaning a company can fully customize the services to its needs. Like others, it has a drag-and-drop feature. Sisense allows you to share reports and dashboards with your team members as well as externally.

Other popular BI tools include: Zoho Analytics, Oracle BI, SAS Visual Analytics, Domo, Datapine, Yellowfin BI, Looker, SAP Business Objects, Clear Analytics, Board, MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos Analytics, Tibco Spotfire, BIRT, Intercom, Google Data Studio, and HubSpot.

What are The Concepts of Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) encompasses several fundamental concepts that collectively enable organizations to transform data into actionable insights:

1. Data Collection and Integration: This involves gathering data from various sources, including internal databases, external APIs, spreadsheets, and more. The data is then integrated, cleaned, and transformed into a consistent format for analysis.

2. Data Analysis: BI professionals use analytical tools and techniques to explore and examine data for patterns, trends, anomalies, and correlations. Statistical methods and machine learning algorithms are often applied to uncover valuable insights.

3. Data Visualization: Transforming complex data into understandable visual formats like charts, graphs, and dashboards is vital. Visualization helps stakeholders comprehend insights quickly and make informed decisions based on the presented information.

4. Reporting and Dashboards: BI involves creating regular reports and interactive dashboards that display key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. These reports provide a snapshot of business performance and allow users to drill down into details.

5. Decision Support: BI aims to support strategic decision-making by providing relevant, accurate, and timely insights. By aligning data analysis with business goals, organizations can optimize processes, identify opportunities, and address challenges effectively.

These five concepts collectively empower organizations to leverage their data as a strategic asset. BI professionals work closely with business stakeholders to understand their needs, develop data models, design visualizations, and facilitate the integration of insights into daily operations, ultimately contributing to improved performance and competitiveness.

The core components of Business Intelligence (BI) encompass data collection, storage, analysis, and presentation. Data is collected from diverse sources, then transformed and stored in a centralized data warehouse or repository. Analysis involves processing data using algorithms, statistical methods, and machine learning to extract insights.

Finally, the results are presented through visualizations, dashboards, and reports to facilitate informed decision-making. This cyclical process ensures that organizations can harness data effectively, gaining actionable insights to enhance performance and strategy.