Business Intelligence Products Overview

Microsoft provides two kinds of products for BI. Shown here is a hypothetical BI system that enables an organization to analyze historical data from operational applications (such as the core transaction processing and customer relationship management applications in a financial institution). The SQL Server BI platform (bottom) enables design and management of the databases for BI, and development of BI applications. Microsoft BI applications (top) enable end users to view and analyze data hosted by the BI platform.

Microsoft’s BI platform consists of three main components:

Integration Services is a platform for data integration scripts, which cleanse, summarize, and transfer data in bulk between data sources. In the BI system shown here, Integration Services performs the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process, which regularly pulls data from the organization’s applications, standardizes the data (e.g., standardizing date formats and column names), and loads the data into a consolidated historical database, the bank’s data warehouse.