A picture is worth a thousand words. While business intelligence tries to make sense of all the data that is collected every day by organizations of all types, communicating the data in a way that people can easily grasp often becomes an issue. In a world where we can produce an astonishing 5.6 zettabytes of data in a year, visualization tools are critical to an organizations success.

Please answer the following question in your initial post:

Why has data visualization become a centerpiece in the business intelligence and analytics business? Is there a difference between data visualization and visual analytics?