That allows an investment bank, for instance, to run a business intelligence (BI) layer on top of its spreadsheets.

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Business Intelligence (BI) has been practiced for decades and is mainstream technology for many industries (finance, retail, insurance, real estate etc.).

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Even though large enterprises have invested tens of millions in business intelligence (BI) systems they still run their company on a bunch of spreadsheets, he added.

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According to a new report by Dresner Advisory Services, the industry titans of Business Intelligence (BI) are waking up to the demands of their enterprise clients.

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As of the last annual survey, the three-highest rated priorities for investment from 2012 to 2015 included Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI), Mobile Technologies and Cloud Computing.

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More than one out four of the 1, 364 organizations surveyed (27%), in fact, already use or plan to use cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to augment their core business intelligence (BI) functions.

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An integrated business intelligence (BI) approach that brings these unique and diverse data points together gives sports organizations the ability to see the big picture and execute growth faster with better-informed decisions.

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But on the business front, a new generation of specialty social analytics and business intelligence (BI) providers like GoodData, NetBase, QlikTech, and Visible Technologies have been some of the first to re-envision BI and provide the tools and platforms to create smarter, more social, special-purpose apps for creating and delivering insights to the right audience on the right device.

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Make no mistake, business intelligence is big business, with data analysis the fastest growing sector in the BI market.

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