Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction Down to the Numbers The Whys and Hows Executive Summary Everybody's Doing It Epoll Results

OK, so what do beer and diapers have in common? They're both likely to be found in the shopping carts of young fathers on a late-night grocery run. Business-intelligence software can help you analyze customer data to make connections that can boost sales, increase efficiency and keep customers. How do you think supermarkets get the smarts to display such seemingly strange product combinations?

But deciding whether to invest in this software, which can run well over $100,000 for a medium-sized installation, means more than running an ROI spreadsheet. After all, how can you judge increased sales or decreased costs before the software is running? Instead, consider how much data you're running, where it's stored and whether you believe you could better reach and service customers by spotting trends and patterns you would have otherwise missed.

We used our own corporate data to test business-intelligence solutions from Brio, Cognos, Information Builders, Microsoft and MicroStrategy. Although all five products came up with similar results, the difference in their presentations affected our impression of how useful each solution would be. In the end, we gave Cognos Series 7 our Editor's Choice award for its superior reporting functions as well as its well-rounded combination of data distribution, analysis and automation. Add to the mix a healthy dose of data-access and application-access security and you've got a solution that we'd toast with champagne--not beer.