That's why a pattern is developing in many businesses as the use of business-intelligence tools grows: Provide power users such as business analysts and report authors with traditional client-based tools, while using Web-based products to open up the tools to a much broader audience of people who don't need as much functionality.

Electronic Arts Inc. operates in one of the world's fastest-changing industries: video games. Accurately monitoring shifts in consumer purchasing is a vital part of ensuring the company stays on track, so Electronic Arts subscribes to services that provide retail sales data and combines that with its own sales data and other information to provide a solid base for analysis using Cognos' PowerPlay software.

"Market share changes month by month. Now that information is a couple of clicks away," says Frank Russell, manager of studio information systems at Electronic Arts in Vancouver, British Columbia. Russell builds the information into multidimensional "cubes" of data that are downloaded to Windows NT servers in the company's California, Japan, London, and Vancouver facilities, where the information can be analyzed by around 30 heavy-duty users of PowerPlay client software, who work mainly in marketing roles.

Before the company installed business-intelligence software, users had to contact the head office and request information from large reports. The software's cost-estimated at around $100,000-was paid back in a year by eliminating the need for a person to compile information in response to those requests. In addi-tion, the whole process is now faster. "What used to take a couple of weeks now takes half a day," Russell says.

The information created using the Cognos software can also be viewed-and manipulated, to a more limited extent-via a browser, and Russell says that makes it easy to provide access to information for game producers and company executives. Unlike the power users in marketing, they often will want simply to view the data rather than perform detailed market analyses-and they can view the data over the Web without the need for client software to be installed on their desktop machines.

"Most client-server users use PowerPlay as an exploratory tool," Russell says. "The client-server software has more functionality than the Web version, though in the case of Cog-nos, the gap is narrowing rapidly."

Analysts and suppliers say there are several areas where traditional client-based versions of business-intelligence products still have an edge in features. Power analysis is one area: Clients still provide custom data-aggregating and other functions that are lacking in Web tools. Report authoring is another. Detailed and precisely laid out reports are best handled by dedicated client-server products, which have finer formatting control, says Meta Group program di- rector Mark Smith. An example is financial reporting, in which there may be statutory requirements for how the information is presented.

Reports created using client software can be distributed to a broader audience of users via E-mail or via a repository on a server, and viewed via a browser or a viewing tool such as Adobe Acrobat.

In some cases, more sophisticated analytic or report-creation functions are being moved into Web-based products, often by providing browser plug-ins that represent a hybrid approach, somewhere between a pure browser and a full client. The trade-off is that conventional client products are still usually faster, analysts say. "It could take five steps with a Web-based product vs. one with client-server," Smith says.

Specialized power users simply do not tolerate moving to a clumsier or less-functional tool. "If you have to trade functionality, it's not going to be acceptable," says Henry Morris, VP of data warehousing at market-research firm IDC.