What Cloud Business Analytics brings to the table

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asimd12
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Joined: Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:12 am

What Cloud Business Analytics brings to the table

Post by asimd12 »

“Business Intelligence” will soon be two decades old as a term to refer to a branch of business software . Specifically, to name the set of tools that help make the data available in an organization useful for decision making in any area: Sales, Finance, Operations, both day-to-day and strategic. Curiously, the term was initially coined in the United States in the 1950s as a business analogy for the novel military intelligence departments of the time, before the appearance of modern business software!


The good fortune of the name becomes evident belgium telegram data when we think about how popular it has become in a world, IT, where we tend to generate an overwhelming amount of terms and acronyms every month, outliving previous competitors (DSS, EIS) and later ones (BPM, CPM). It has been useful, it has worked well as an umbrella term to talk about a series of quite varied tools (OLAP, DW, ETL, Reporting, BSC, Data Mining) that share the same objective, to help steer companies in a world that has become extremely computerized in recent years.

However, in recent years, another competing term has been gaining more and more prominence: “Business Analytics” . You only have to look at a comparison between the two on Google Trends to see that it has surpassed (at least in search volume on the contemporary Aleph that is Google) Business Intelligence.

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Why is this? Have we simply changed the name of Business Intelligence? Is Business Analytics a new and different family of tools? Is it a part of the whole that is Business Intelligence? So why has BA overtaken the supposed “umbrella” term BI?

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I don't pretend to have an answer, after all we are talking about nomenclature, but I do have an opinion. If we look at the market and the communications made by various manufacturers, there is everything. Some have decided to use the term and name their entire suite as such, others use both in an ambivalent way, and others use this term to refer to some specific functionalities (in particular visual interactive reporting and prediction and scenario analysis tools). As is often the case with new terminologies, there is quite a bit of confusion.
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