Believe it or not, business intelligence software has been around since even before personal computers got here – since the 60s, actually. In most large corporations, software that serves this purpose is on top of the list. Whatever they cut back on, they will never cut back on this. Basically, that’s because business intelligence software is designed to help corporations make the most efficient use possible of what resources they have.
The fact is, there’s a lot of money in any software that is very important to businesses. A popular genre of software like this, naturally, is a very attractive area for software companies to invest their talents in. Believe it or not, there are actually a hundred different vendors selling these packages. If you were to be tasked with equipping your business with business intelligence software, you would certainly have your job cut out for you. So let’s start at the beginning.
What exactly does business intelligence software do? Well, it can be a very complicated explanation, indeed. And you would need to understand something about business intelligence understand first. Basically, modern business intelligence software of the kind you see today, has evolved from a system of information technology tools with names like Online Analytical Processing and Extract, Transform and Load.
These used to be discrete tools used by IT departments. At some point, vendors began to realize that these tools could be used in business intelligence as well. These days, the move to business intelligence is quite complete. IT staff no longer use these tools. Businesses do.
Today’s business intelligence software isn’t made for technically-minded people. It’s made for managers. And so, it tends to be rather user-friendly.
Managerial staff at businesses use this software to collect data from every department through the company, to collect data about everything in the economy that could affect business, and to use all that to arrive at projections to do with a lot of things – risks, opportunities, patterns, and so on.
Before a company actually goes and buys business ntelligence software, they need to try to understand which way the business intelligence software market is headed at the moment.
It used to be that business intelligence software would take months to process all the data that came by it, before it would put out a prediction. These days, these things happen much faster. If you’ve been around this, software for long period of time, you might notice how much things have sped up.
The major trend and business intelligence software there is these days takes it away from large computers. These days, it’s marketed as a cloud application and as a smartphone application.
