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September 27, 1999

E-Business Intelligence

Products let companies analyze data for customers and partners via the Internet

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ompanies are beginning to move business-intelligence capabilities beyond internal use and incorporate them into their E-business strategies. Analysts expect this trend to grow, as vendors introduce technologies that make it easier to offer data-analysis capabilities over the Internet to customers, suppliers, and business partners.

There should be plenty of demand for such tools, as business intelligence is a natural fit for E-business, analysts say. "The Net is providing organizations with a much-less-expensive medium to transport and disseminate information to a broader constituency," says Aberdeen Group analyst Bob Moran. "Business intelligence and the Web should be interwoven."

Beverage Data Network Inc. in Verona, N.J., plans to use a product due next month from MicroStrategy Inc. that will let it extend data- analysis capabilities to its customers, alcoholic beverage companies.

Beverage Data Network collects inventory and sales data from beverage distributors for the creation of reports it provides to beverage makers and importers. The company uses MicroStrategy tools to develop reports that analyze information such as sales trends and distributors' sales volumes. The reports are then E-mailed to clients.

The company plans to use MicroStrategy's InfoCenter intelligence delivery portal software to develop a Web portal that will let customers query Beverage Data Network's data warehouse using PCs, phones, handheld computers, and notebooks. "Users have a need to get down to a real low level of detail, and you can't E-mail a data warehouse," says Jonathan Fieldman, the company's data warehouse director.

It was only within the past year that Beverage Data Network added analysis capabilities to the data it provides customers. "I saw there was a real need for reporting and analysis services," Fieldman says.

Also in October, QueryObject Systems Corp. will introduce QueryObject Analyzer for building Internet data marts and will provide free browsers for accessing these marts. Earlier this month, Cognos Inc. revealed plans to build a portal interface into the next release of its PowerPlay and Impromptu business-intelligence tools to make it easier for a company's internal and external users to access data.

Medac Inc., an Augusta, Ga., medical billing-services firm, will roll out data-analysis capabilities over the Web next month to about 800 anesthesiologist groups it serves, using business-intelligence software from Cognos, Medac's custom-developed KAM 2000 billing software, and a data warehouse it's building on a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Medical group users will be able to slice-and-dice billing reports to find the information they're seeking. They'll be able to determine, for example, which insurance carriers haven't paid on patient claims, or which procedures yielded the most revenue in the past month. "This is giving them the information they need to find out how their service is doing," Medac president John Memar says.

Providing its customers with tools that can boost their profits gives Medac an edge, Memar says. "There's no other billing service that could provide what we're providing today," he says. Memar hopes to evolve the service into an information brokerage to which businesses and others will subscribe for reports on insurance-carrier operations, and for data that can be used for negotiating contracts with HMOs.

IBM last week released an updated version of its Intelligent Miner data mining tool that has improved visualization capabilities, designed to make data mining results understandable to more types of users.

"More companies are rolling out information from their data warehouses to larger audiences," says Ben Barnes, general manager of Global Business Intelligence Solutions at IBM. "We see business intelligence as the next major wave of E-business." IBM is pricing Intelligent Miner for Data 6.1 at $60,000 per processor. The company is also offering a version for customer-relationship analysis, priced at $90,000, and data mart packages for E-commerce and customer-relationship analysis.

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