Decision Guide for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
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Palo Alto Management Group (PAMG), publisher of the landmark Database Solutions study series, announced the imminent release of a new research report entitled Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing: Crossing the Millennium. A definitive guide for users planning to implement data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence(BI) solutions, it is based on an analysis of the actions and plans of 375 companies and focuses on applications that will be adopted for competitive and/or economic advantage. The report will be available direct from PAMG direct and through DM Review magazine's website.

Report author Bruce Love states, "The deployment of enterprise level BI applications will rise to an average of roughly seven per organization by the year 2000, 50% more than today. The telecommunications and financial services industries are leading the way. Enterprises in these sectors are implementing more new BI apps than organizations in other industries.

"Marketing-related applications such as customer segment analysis, target marketing and retention comprise nearly 40% of all BI applications currently implemented across all industry sectors. However, the fastest growing applications are in quality analysis, category management and promotion/campaign analysis. This is a strong indication that BI solutions will continue to expand beyond the more traditional financial and marketing areas. This expansion will mean that more new users will become involved in the BI process, many of them from outside of the organization such as customers, suppliers and business partners," Love says.

Co-author Mike Burwen adds, "This expansion signals huge increases in the scale of DW/BI applications. Our research shows a 50 times increase in the number of users, a 24 times increase in average database size, and a tendency towards increasing data proliferation and fragmentation across the enterprise. Without careful planning and controls, users are facing a threat to business performance that will, five years from now, make the Year 2000 problem seem almost trivial."

Palo Alto Management Group, Inc. is a market research and consulting firm that specializes in the analysis of data warehousing and business intelligence technologies, markets and business issues. DM Review is the leading publication serving the BI/DW community. Links to documentation describing the report, including a detailed table of contents, may be found at http://www.pamg.com or http://www.dmreview.com