Comparing BI Terminology – One Example

When shopping for a BI software suite or just to give your company an entry-level capability, be conscious of the trends and differences in key terminology between vendors.

Information Builders, in their WebFOCUS product describes the following capabilities:

· Reporting – Web and browser based tools that provide executives, analysts, customers, and partners to rapidly create rich, formatted reports from enterprise data.

· Query and Analysis – Providing the functionality of query tools, reporting tools, and OLAP into one solution.

· Visualization – Visual Discovery allows in-depth intuitive analysis from any enterprise data source.

· Transaction Systems – Maintain is a high performance solution for building and deploying BI to concurrent users.

Comparatively, Cognos, and its Cognos 8 product describes:

· Reporting – Web services-based tools that report against all operational systems, OLAP, and relational data sources.

· Analysis – Explore and analyze information from OLAP or dimensionally aware, relational sources using drag and drop, comparative or predictive techniques.

· Scorecarding – Link initiatives and projects to strategy and metrics.

· Dashboards – Web-based at-a-glance sna