Business Intelligence and analytics are the set of strategies, processes, applications, data, products, technologies and technical architectures which are used to support the collection, analysis, presentation and dissemination of business information. Business Intelligence and analytics technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Functions of business intelligence and analytic technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics and are capable of handling large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities.

The goal is to allow for the easy interpretation of these big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on professionalism can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.Business intelligence can be used to support a wide range of business decisions ranging from operational to strategic. Basic operating decisions include product positioning or pricing. Strategic business decisions include priorities, goals and directions at the broadest level. In all cases, Business Intelligence and analytics is most effective when it combines data derived from the market in which a company operates (external data) with data from company sources internal to the business such as financial and operations data (internal data). When combined, external and internal data can provide a more complete picture, which, in effect, creates “intelligence” that, cannot be derived by any singular set of data.

Amongst myriad uses, business intelligence tools empower organizations to gain insight into new markets, assess demand and suitability of products and services for different market segments and gauge the impact of marketing efforts Business intelligence data typically is stored in a data warehouse or shorter data marts that hold subsets of a company's information. In addition, Hadoop systems are increasingly being used within Business Intelligence And Analytics architectures as repositories or landing pads for Business Intelligence and Analytics data, especially for unstructured data, log files, sensor data and other types of big data. Before it's used in Business Intelligence And Analytics Applications, raw data from different source systems must be integrated, consolidated and cleansed using data integration and data quality tools to ensure that users are analyzing accurate and consistent information.