Business Trends Today's concerns about a weakening economy might serve as a wake-up call for companies to be more focused on monitoring business results and taking appropriate actions to keep the business on track. Enterprises can no longer stay competitive just by squeezing more efficiencies and productivity gains from operational applications. Business leaders expect to make smarter and/or more timely decisions based on better information than the competition in order to increase their market share, increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, enter new markets, and ultimately deliver more products and services to more customers. BI is the key to providing the right information to the right business stakeholders. By staying abreast of the latest trends, enterprises can strive to become more effective by making decisions based on more complete, complex, and timely information. Despite a large body of knowledge about, and best practices for, business performance management, many companies still struggle to put appropriate processes and technology solutions in place. Business performance solutions (BPS) strategies require executive leadership, a clear and structured business strategy, organizational commitment, process maturity, and the right technology to deliver results. Increase in acceptance The term "business intelligence" (BI) has emerged over the last ten years as a catch-all for a wide range of financial, analytical, and reporting systems that companies use to steer their business toward higher profitability and sustainable competitive advantage. Not only do enterprises need to optimize their business processes, they also want to optimize their business results. The ability to drive business decisions comes from the ability to understand what has happened in the past as well as having a look into the future - subsequently companies need forward and backward looking capabilities in their BI tools. The ability to look back over a company's past performance has been the focus of BI tools for many years  - dashboards displaying last month's margins and cost-of-goods are important and useful tools. The ability to combine this type of executive dashboard with business projections, forecasts, available to promise inventory levels, market projections, etc. can give your company executives the centralized management tools needed to make critical business decisions effecting the direction of the company. Rise in open systems In the current economic climate, organizations have to review and rationalize expenses associated with all enterprise software. As a direct consequence, open source business intelligence (BI) is emerging as an important choice for new as well as existing BI implementations. Even though most analyst research indicates that its evolution may have been understated thus far, open source BI is growing rapidly. Open source BI solutions have already been proved to complement and integrate well with traditional BI environments. In their own right, open source BI vendors offer competitive technologies and present the irrefutable advantage of cost savings.