Once upon a time, business intelligence (BI) vendors sold entire Enterprise stacks, including back-end servers, data integration, query, visualization, dashboarding and maybe a planning/corporate performance management module. These big stacks made for big Enterprise agreements...and big price tags. But for IT shops at big companies, it made sense.
At the departmental level, meanwhile, some users found the Enterprise data visualization tools to be cumbersome, and they wanted the ability to bring in their own data. So-called self-service BI tools addressed this by providing friendlier user interfaces, without all the baggage and expense of the rest of an Enterprise BI stack. They also provided connectivity to a range of databases, big data platforms, file formats and Web service APIs, so business users could do their own thing.
