Business intelligence (BI) can be described as "a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". BI technologies are capable of handling large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. NOTE: Some of these functions are broken out into their own categories.
At enlyft, we use sophisticated, patent-pending algorithms to track the use of various Business Intelligence products and technologies. We track 166 products in the Business Intelligence category, and have found 691,824 companies using these products.