Business Intelligence Open Source Tools: Review

Automated data collection tools have led to storage of enormous amounts of data in data repositories. The organizations can benefit from this huge collection of data if and only if they are able to extract meaningful information for the benefit of their business. To survive in the modern competitive business world, the managers are in continuous need of right information at the right time in the right place to be able to make faster and better decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) plays an important role in enabling the business organizations to capture, extract, comprehend, utilize and harness multidimensional data to support decision making in order to improve business operation in complex and dynamic environment. A BI system includes capabilities for decision support, online analytical processing, prediction and data mining. The paper discusses the need for BI, the components of BI system, the benefits and challenges of adopting Open Source BI systems by organizations and finally five Open Source BI tools are presented