The term business intelligence (BI) represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making.

Generally these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.

A data warehouse is a copy of transaction data specifically structured for querying and reporting.

A Data Warehouse (DW) is simply a consolidation of data from a variety of sources that is designed to support strategic and tactical decision making. Its main purpose is to provide a coherent picture of the business at a point in time. Using various Data Warehousing toolsets, users are able to run online queries and 'mine' their data.

This includes:

• Data Warehouse
• Extract Transform & Load (ETL)
• OLAP / Business Intelligence
• Data Mining