Content portal

The SharePoint products will become a portal for all BI content, providing security-enhanced access to business information in one place.

Accessibility was the key, agreed Business Objects' Wells. Certainly, BI technology was empowering because it gave the average worker the power and control of information.

"While the technology used to be held in some dark corner of the IT department, it's now being disseminated out to the user community," he said.

Professional Advantage, a Microsoft partner with expertise in ERP in the mid-market, jumped into the BI space and developed a consulting practice in 2000. The company's Microsoft business manager, Roger Pegler, said it had performed small-scale, simple add-on BI jobs through to full-scale implementations.

"Clients are spending all of their time and effort getting transaction systems in place, and now want to leverage the infrastructure - and BI is a good way to do it," he said.

BI is going beyond traditional sales analysis, and attractive to key segments, he said.

"We are seeing it point-of-sale [in retail], and particularly in the franchise industry. A head office can set up some simple analytics made available to the franchise, create benchmarks and do performance tracking," Pegler said.

And unlike an ERP implementation, the BI experience can be an ongoing job.

"It's not like ERP where you have a big bang and it's up and running," he said.

With BI, it's an ongoing process, deciphering where the data is, isolating core business and IT issues and scripting a plan.

"The biggest challenge is sitting with end-users and executives and determining what they need from the data, and how it needs to be analysed," Pegler said.