What Exactly Is Business Intelligence?

SAP Analytics Hub simplifies access to analytics scattered across multiple heterogeneous environments. Some experts believe the main difference comes down to time: business intelligence helps in the day-to-day operations and how things look in the present, whereas business analytics helps business planning for the future, such as using predictive analytics to figure out why things are happening and how things will look in the future.

Comparing seasonal sales can also be of great importance depending on the type of business you are in. The software used to create Business Intelligence reports is capable of producing any variation of date ranges imaginable, so some thought is required to take maximum advantage of all these possibilities.

Someone will look at reports from, for example, last year’s sales — that’s BI — but they’ll also get predictions about next year’s sales — that’s business analytics — and then add to that a what-if capability: What would happen if we did X instead of Y,” Gorman says, explaining that software makers are moving to develop applications that will provide those functions within a single application rather than delivering them via multiple platforms as is now the case.

Software behemoth, Microsoft, also plays in the business intelligence tool space, and their offering is Power Bi They even have a Microsoft Business Applications Summit that features their Power BI, and not surprisingly other Microsoft business applications.

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