Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are needed for analyzing, understanding and reporting the data generated from business activities. It makes business processes and operations more efficient and effective. In an ever more competitive world, not surprisingly, BI sits at the top of the IT priority list for many companies. Its promises attract any organization, and explosive data growth further fuels the demand for it. In 2007, the BI software market is estimated to be $8 Billion.

So what is BI from an end user perspective ?

Although involving many components behind the scene, BI manifests itself as reports in front of end users. They include operational reports, analytical reports, and portal reports. For example, real time inventory change could be an operational report, customer profiling and trend analysis could be analytical reports, and employee satisfaction rate could be a portal report published on intranet. Experience shows that the biggest ROI normally comes from providing rich analytical reports to power analysts.