EBay's Business-Intelligence Bid

EBay Inc. will use MicroStrategy Inc.'s business-intelligence software to analyze the terabytes of sales data the online auction company has collected in a data warehouse. EBay is expected to use the analytical results to better organize the 27,000 product categories on its Web site, which on any given day has more than 16 million items up for sale.

EBay is installing the MicroStrategy software in an implementation that could ultimately include hundreds or thousands of eBay employees. Other details of the project and the value of the deal were not disclosed. Last year, eBay users bought and sold $14.9 billion in merchandise.