Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of systems for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to information to assist in the process of decision making at strategic and local levels. This is crucial to Liverpool John Moores University now more than ever as the sector moves into a very different and more competitive market place. A robust BI system helps to keep us ahead of the market allowing LJMU to be proactive as well as reactive.

BI systems should have several attributes depending on its maturity, attributes such as:- • Accessibility when needed • Concise, pictorial or graphical • Up to date, current • Known update times and intervals • Can select data for [any, or defined] time period • Good, reliable quality and integrity of data items  • Drill-down and roll-up capabilities (zoom in or zoom out; allowing broader or narrower views, s the user requires) • Easy to understand • Easy to export to a presentation or document • Easy to add new information sources (internal or external) • Allows the user to ask "What if... ?" questions

. Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: it is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network (including the Internet). There are at least a dozen different editions of Microsoft SQL Server aimed at different audiences and for different workloads (ranging from small applications that store and retrieve data on the same computer, to millions of users and computers that access huge amounts of data from the Internet at the same time).

Cognos is IBM's business intelligence (BI) and performance management software suite. The software is designed to enable business users without technical knowledge to extract corporate data, analyze it and assemble reports.  

Cognos is composed of nearly three dozen software products. Because Cognos is built on open standards, the software products can be used with relational and multidimensionaldata sources from multiple vendors, including Microsoft, NCR Teradata.

Gartner‘s and Forrester‘s depiction of tools has broad equivalence. Their x-axes are Completeness of Vision and Strategy respectively; their y-axes are Ability to Execute and [strength of] Current Offering. Additionally, Forrester’s Wave helpfully spells out equivalence (of a sort), and sizes out market presence.

Moreover, it has to be accepted that BI is an ongoing project. If a consultant sets and an enterprise forgets, a couple of years down the track there will be significant atrophy of relevance. Business needs, expectations, and technological possibilities are constantly evolving. That latter is where product leadership has the most significance.

Forrester Wave shows us - IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, and SAS continue to lead the pack. All of the

2008 Leaders maintained their overall positions, once again confirming the full commitment

by their corporate senior executives to BI. All scores hit within a few decimal points of each

other, but under the covers they are quite different. IBM Cognos rolled out Cognos 8 on

System z and is busy integrating with the recently acquired SPSS, bringing traditional and

advanced analytics closer together — all in a direct challenge to SAS traditional strengths.5 SAP

BusinessObjects continues to steamroll with innovative products like Explorer and in-memory

analytical appliance — Business Warehouse Accelerator. Oracle has built new metadata-level

OBIEE 11g integration with Fusion Middleware and Fusion Apps and continues to differentiate

with its versatile ROLAP engine (a distinction shared only with MicroStrategy). SAS, the largest

privately held software company, leverages its advantage of organically grown — with very few

acquisitions — functionality with a seamlessly integrated BI platform.

Information Builders, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy move into the Leaders category. The

leadership space in the Wave just got more crowded with Information Builders, Microsoft,

and MicroStrategy taking their well earned position among the Leaders. Information Builders

continues to provide a very respectable alternative to the software behemoths, as the only

midsize vendor to offer a nearly full BI stack functionality. Microsoft closed some of the

previous gaps with acquisitions of data quality and MDM technologies, and now leverages

SharePoint success and ubiquity as a critical component of a BI platform. And MicroStrategy

earned the extra recognition with its new multisourcing and in-memory ROLAP capabilities.

· TIBCO Spotfire and Actuate maintain their Strong Performer status. TIBCO Spotfire

offers top choices for analytics and even surpasses the other Strong Performers in the overall

information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application

integration. Actuate, a Leader in the 2010 Forrester Wave evaluating open source software BI,

has revamped its entire platform and is now mostly based on open source BIRT technology.6

· QlikTech and Panorama Software move into the Strong Performer category. Both vendors

got a well-deserved Forrester Wave upgrade based on the continuous improvements of their

analytical capabilities. QlikTech, which launched a successful IPO in July 2010, has validated

market need for in-memory analytics and modeless exploration with ongoing competition

from TIBCO Spotfire and Microsoft’s new PowerPivot product.7 Panorama Software proves

that although the market now enjoys new technologies and new approaches to analysis and

reporting, MDX-based OLAP is still in high demand and in some cases is all that the business

needs for certain types of BI use cases.

Business Intelligence usage in Russia is on the up. This article discusses the growth in the Russian BI market and briefly compares the BI market with the US and European markets. It also describes how Russian organizations prepare for a BI implementation.

In the times of the former Soviet Union the economy was fully controlled by the government. There was no competition among companies, and their managers were not interested in the optimization of business processes. Therefore, the first users of BI tools in Russia were the branches of multinational corporations whose headquarters were located in countries with a highly developed market economy.