Gartner defines analytics and business intelligence platforms (ABI) as those that enable organizations to model, analyze and visualize data to support informed decision making and value creation. These platforms facilitate the preparation of data and the creation of interactive dashboards, reports and visualizations to uncover patterns, predict trends and optimize operations. By doing so, they empower users to collaborate and effectively communicate the dimensions and measures that drive their organization. The platforms may also optionally include the ability to create, modify or enrich a semantic model, including business rules. Analytics and business intelligence platforms integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and external data feeds, to provide a unified view of data, breaking down silos and transforming raw data into meaningful insights. They also allow users to clean, transform and prepare data for analysis, in addition to creating data models that define relationships between different data entities.
Data virtualization technology is based on the execution of distributed data management processing, primarily for queries, against multiple heterogeneous data sources, and federation of query results into virtual views. This is followed by the consumption of these virtual views by applications, query/reporting tools, message-oriented middleware or other data management infrastructure components. Data virtualization can be used to create virtualized and integrated views of data in-memory, rather than executing data movement and physically storing integrated views in a target data structure. It provides a layer of abstraction above the physical implementation of data, to simplify querying logic.