History of Brio Business Intelligence
Brio business intelligence is actually a term often used to describe the technologies invented and sold by Brio Technology, later named Brio Software. Brio business intelligence products were eventually purchased by Hyperion, and later Oracle. Hyperion was one of the largest competitors of Business Objects and Cognos. Brio business intelligence products started life as simple data query and analysis tools. These reporting tools were early versions of software designed to provide analytics and data visualization capabilities to enterprise organizations. The brio business intelligence products eventually were expanded to include true reporting and visualization tools. Brio software eventually merged with SQRiBE, a small company in California that offered reporting and portal products.
Brio Business Intelligence Products
One of the first products in the brio business intelligence family was Data Prism. This brio business intelligence solution allowed organizations to perform simple queries and analyses of enterprise databases. Data Pivot, another brio business intelligence product, allowed users to create reports where data was totaled automatically. This idea was later also adopted by products like Excel in the form of pivot tables. After the merger with SQRiBE the family of brio business intelligence products never grew and the company ran into financial difficulties before being acquired by Hyperion.
Brio Business Intelligence And OLAP Cubes
The brio business intelligence product known as Data Pivot was in fact one of the earliest forms of OLAP applications, allowing organizations to create representations of their data that were automatically totaled and summarized. The brio business intelligence products in this area were in many ways pioneering and forged a brand new area of data reporting and analysis that would eventually become business intelligence as we know it today.
Brio Business Intelligence and Hyperion
After the acquisition of the brio business intelligence products, Hyperion began a process of merging the technology into its own family of products, ultimately leading to the release of new business performance management applications based on the brio business intelligence suite of products. The software that was once sold as brio business intelligence is now fully integrated into the Hyperion software suite that Oracle is attempting to now integrate into its own business intelligence family.
Importance of Brio Business Intelligence
The importance of brio business intelligence to the BI community is two fold. To begin with, brio business intelligence was a pioneering company that led the development of new tools and techniques that have now become commonplace in business intelligence and reporting products. The brio business intelligence family of products provided early on some of the most sophisticated ways of looking at data available. The second importance is in the eventual demise of brio business intelligence and the lessons that demise presented to business intelligence companies.
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