Business Intelligence, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Scorecarding

Business Intelligence Software Products

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More than 23,000 leading organizations worldwide choose IBM Cognos software for performance management.


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Performance Management      Business Intelligence Reporting      Budgeting and Forecasting

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IBM Brings Superior Tools to Business Intelligence

It's not hard to understand why IBM is the world's leading provider of business intelligence software. One need only look at the list of clients that report significant return on investment using IBM software and services to see how pervasive IBM solutions are among the world's most successful companies. IBM succeeds — and helps customers succeed — by providing complete business intelligence functionality in one product on single proven architecture, simplifying IT requirements and improving the way that everyone in the organization works with information. The result is increased user adoption, stronger decision-making and speedier response across the enterprise to opportunities and risks.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the technology and practice of applying information to make decisions. In this way, business intelligence is different than data warehousing, which is more about storing information. It is also more comprehensive than data mining. Information shows its real value when many people can use and share it. This is the goal of business intelligence.

For information to be this usable, it must be trusted, timely, relevant, easy-to-use, and in context. These are all necessary aspects of business intelligence technology. Different business intelligence tools address these factors in different ways. Reporting delivers regular, timely information, with the ability to author reports or queries to get specific details. OLAP analysis, with its multiple dimensions, allows you to compare and contrast information against time and other factors to uncover trends. Scorecarding presents your key performance metrics and whether you've cross pre-determined thresholds. Executive dashboards put information in context, and in an easy-to-understand format.

All of these business intelligence tools should integrate to present a coordinated view of your organization. In this way, people using different tools share the same answers to the same questions, gain more value from your information investment, and make better decisions.

For performance management expertise and business intelligence software, IBM, is the source of vendor-neutral solutions that combine reporting with enterprise risk management, planning, olap analysis, data integration, dashboards, and scorecards. Unrivaled performance management expertise goes into creating business intelligence tools that link data sources and protect investments in SAP, Oracle, and other vendors for superior performance.