If you’re hearing the term business intelligence analytics and wondering what it actually means, think of it as the umbrella of tools, practices, and platforms that turn organizational data into decision-ready insight. Analysts often group this under “Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI),” which encompasses the applications, infrastructure, and best practices that enable people to access and analyze information to enhance decision-making and performance.

What it includes (the essentials) Leading analysts describe BI platforms in three capability buckets: analysis (e.g., OLAP, ad-hoc queries), information delivery (reports, dashboards), and platform integration (metadata management, dev environment). Together, these let teams move from raw data to governed, repeatable insights at scale. Under the hood, BI sits atop your data estate: a data warehouse for curated, structured tables and, increasingly, a data lake for raw, multi-format data that fuels exploration and ML. Additionally, the semantic layer defines shared KPIs, so “revenue,” “ARPU,” and “churn” have the same meaning everywhere; self-service features then enable business users to explore within defined guardrails.

Learn more: Explore services → and Product profitability with BI →.