One -Stop Source for Technology Solutions.

What is business intelligence?

We see BI as a company's ability to leverage the information resources that they have available-whether internal or external to their organization-to drive real business decisions and to take action. It's turning data into information and information into decisions and actions.

From a technical standpoint, what makes up a BI solution/application?

We look at a BI technology solution as encompassing everything from where you source the information (enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, legacy apps, or the Internet); through extracting, transforming, and cleansing that information; to populating it into a data warehouse, which could include things like an operational data store or a data mart; to ultimately delivering the information to individuals throughout the enterprise through a variety of delivery mechanisms. Those mechanisms can include things like traditional OLAP or analytical tools, data mining tools, and portals.

So BI isn't a technology product per se, but more of a strategy that different products fit in to?

We see the BI space as containing three important elements. One, of course, is the data or information. The second piece is the tools and technology. The third, and maybe the most important piece, is around the strategy, processes, and organizational aspects of this. You have to include all three dimensions to be successful.

The value is tremendous. Looking at it from a top-line perspective around customers, companies have really deployed BI apps to identify and attract new customers, cross- and up-sell to their existing customer base in a much more personalized way, using BI to retain customers, etc. Over the last year or two, as priorities have changed, companies have used BI apps to take a look at where they could operate more efficiently and drive costs out of the business. Now, we're finding that companies are focused on bottom-line results like product and customer profitability. The whole notion of what we call integrated performance management or balanced scorecard, which takes a look across the entire enterprise. We're seeing BI apps embedded into every function within an enterprise.

Is it a technology just for large companies or is it useful for smaller companies as well?

We think that as more progress is made in developing analytical applications (what we call i-Analytics, which basically packages a lot of what we've talked about), business intelligence will become a lot more attractive to small and middle market companies. Ultimately, you're going to see more companies look to organizations like ours to outsource these applications. There is certainly some sensitivity around customer and financial information, but I think we're seeing more situations in which companies are saying, "This isn't a core competency. We have a lot of data located around the organization that we're not getting full value from it. Take the information and deliver us the answers."