Short answer on this soliloquy: Data Visualization.
Long Answer: read this blog (I guess soliloquy is what people used before blogs). BI is a marketing term, Intelligence is an attribute of human. There is no such thing as BI software. However I know some good Data Visualization Software, which can produce interactive near real-time dashboards with synchronized charts and allow user to drilldown to a piece of data, which may help to user to act.
I have more fuzzy question for visitor of this blog: why we can see on market so many so called “BI vendors”:
- DV Leaders: Qlikview, Spotfire, Tableau, Visokio
- DV Misleaders: SAP, IBM, SAS, Oracle, Microsoft, Microstrategy, Information Builders.
- BI Vendors: Actuate, Panorama, Visual Mining, Pagos, Panopticon, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Advizor Solutions, arcplan, …
- BDA Vendors: Teradata, EMC, Paradigm4, Vertica/HP, VoltDB, Infobright, …
- SDK Vendors for DV DIY (Do It Yourself) optimists and money/time wasters: Dundas, Infragistics, ComponentArt, FusionCharts, DevExpress, ComponentOne, Telerik, …
- Others (the list below may grow, but again, why this list is so long?):
- http://www.logixml.com/
- http://www.idvsolutions.com/
- http://www.board.com/IN/Home
- http://www.idbs.com/ (with remnants of InforSense and Quantrix)
- http://www.iccube.com/
- http://centrifugesystems.com/
- http://bimeanalytics.com/
- http://www.jedox.com
- http://dataroket.com/
- http://www.algebraixdata.com/
- http://www.emanio.com/
- http://www.boartwall.com/
- http://www.binoclebi.com/
- http://www.fusionops.com/
- http://full360.com/
- http://www.robustdesigns.com/html/
- http://www.altosoft.com/products/insightbi.shtml
- http://www.sisense.com/
- http://www.spagoworld.org/xwiki/bin/view/SpagoBI/
If you have an addition to this list, please comment on this page or send a message. I guess Microstrategy wants to be on this list twice: http://www.microstrategy.com/freereportingsoftware/
Again, question is:
WHY SO MANY?
Permalink: https://apandre.wordpress.com/tobiornottobi/
Data Visualization 
November 13, 2011 at 12:36 pm
Dear Andrei: Great article.
I’m working on a directory of BI & Analytics solutions from around the world that is approaching the 600 mark. All of them are different, some innovative. They range from generic to industry specific, from high cost to free or open source; from basic reporting to sophisticated predictive analytics, from OLAP to advanced visualization, from desktop to browser based, from BPM to dashboards, from on-premise to cloud; and there are many that offer Excel interface /integration.
The reason for the high number is that even in a world wide recession BI/ Analytics market continues to grow at approx. 10% annual rate, fueled by the rapid annual growth of corporate data (41%).
The exponential growth in memory capacity and processing speed described by Moore’s law coupled with the constant reduction in cost is, in my opinion, the underlying cause of the data growth.
Regards, Bill
May 23, 2012 at 8:04 pm
I would also place http://www.strategycompanion.com as an optional Visualization tool for Microsoft SSAS, since Excel and PowerPivot do not accomplish to do so.