Three or four years ago an abbreviation BI was perceived as something new and obscure. Nowadays each main organization has introduced the BI-system or plans its introduction in the near future. That is why the BI creators are under scrutiny of big IT corporations.

Present day the market of systems of class Business Intelligence (BI) is represented by an entire line of more than a dozen of diverse companies.

Originally, the analytical systems were a union of suppliers of databases and analytical applications. A little later the distributors of ETL-tools (Extract-Transformation-Load) joined them; they allowed automating the process of gathering, processing and loading information into the database. This consolidation has led to the appearance of a new class of platforms – Business Intelligence (BI). Of course, the leaders of software noticed its perspective and initiated the elaborations to create their own BI-solutions.

According to experts IDC, the evolution of BI-systems can be divided into 3 waves. Thus, the systems of the first wave that ended in 1990 were aimed at gathering information and preparing regimented reporting.

Systems of the second wave, which were lasting roughly from 1990 to 2005, provided their users with the tools of quick multivariate analysis on the basis of technology OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing), as well as the possibility of independent creation of unregulated reporting.

Systems of the third wave that has begun in 2005 have the task to expand the target audience of users of BI-systems and to focus on the development of applied methods of applications, including predictive analytics and search for hidden information Data Mining. The vertical solutions for specific market segments and horizontal solutions for unified business objectives are offered.

Now we are just observing the emergence of BI-solutions of the third wave. They include BI-systems of the famous world leaders: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAS and others.

Sooner or later practically every serious business starts looking for an automated reporting. One of the most popular solutions today is Crystal Reports. Also SQL Server reporting tools might be implemented to meet those requirements.