What are 5 fundamental features every Business Intelligence solution should include?

This question can be answered in multiple ways, such as - in terms of technological features, or in terms of capabilities.

In terms of features, BI is considered complete when you have all of the fundamental components:

1. ETL engine (Extract, Transform and Load) - this moves data into the solution, and also can apply rules to cleanse or prepare data for analysis.
2. Data warehouse - having information in a data warehouse improves data governance and also the range and depth of analysis that you can do on the information
3. Analysis engine - this is typically what you buy from a traditional BI provider
4. Reporting/visualization engine - after the data has been analyzed, it needs to be put into a form that is easy to consume.
5. Distribution capability - this is how those beautiful reports get to the end users. Are they put in PDFs and emailed? Shared on-demand dashboards? Put into Excel files on Sharepoint?

In traditional, on-premise BI, each of those components is provided by a different vendor, and the customer is responsible for stitching them all together into their "BI solution." Some more modern vendors offer all of the components fully integrated, so that you don't have the pain and expense of putting the parts together yourself and then maintaining it over time.

The other way of looking at this is capabilities, which is how Gantantar replied. When you think about *how* you want people to use insight, or what you want them to achieve with it, you probably want some of the following:

1. Ease of use - this allows more people to either consume or explore information. The more facts that people have, the better decisions that they will make.
2. High availability and scalability - the solution is working the vast majority of the time, and can grow to accommodate as many users or information as you need it to
3. Ability to easily explore data -- Canned reports are easy, but they often are the *start* of a data conversation. So sales are dropping in the Midwest. Why? Now you have a bunch of hypotheses that you want to investigate. The solution should be able to accommodate that exploration and question asking. This is also known as ad hoc analysis.
4. Ability to integrate multiple data sources - the questions that you have probably span data collected or managed by sales, finance, operations, marketing, etc. Your solution better be able to pull that information together.
5. Ability to quickly and easily extend or update the solution - so last year you had 10 KPIs to manage. This year you have 20, and you also want new dashboards for the sales, HR, and finance departments. You want to make sure that your solution can do this quickly, so that you're not waiting months and spending significantly more dollars to get the information you need now.

Hope that helps. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Birst, a SaaS business intelligence company (www.birst.com).