I often find creating custom queries against a specific database (e.g. MySQL) for Marketing/Strategy/Business people (e.g. they can't write SQL queries). However, I'm convinced there must be existing tools that are designed precisely for that kind of business intelligence querying and visualization. Do you know of any such software/tool?
What platform? We sell and use Qlikview on Windows which lets our customers run all sorts of revenue/business queries against data (which is populated from .csv into MSSQL and then we have processes which load the data from MSSQL into the .qvw documents so the users can download and use it offline on the train or in meetings with clients etc)
There are lots of BI products out there that are designed to be easy for end users: MicroStrategy, Tableau, etc. Or are you looking for something open source?