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1. COMPANY PROFILE 1.
 An introduction
 Profile

2. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND IT’S USE

IN DECISION MAKING 7.
 Definition
 Evolution Of Business Intelligence :

MARKET ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS

3. INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE
 Market Growth For Business 11.
Intelligence
 Registered strong holds in Business
Intelligence
 Market Share Trend Of The
Companies
 Comparative Analysis
Sam

4. INDUSTRIAL USE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 14.

5. TOOLS USED IN BUSINESS 18.

INTELLIGENCE

6.
UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 30.
USING MICROSTRATEGY 7i

7. FUTURE OF 66.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

8. ANNEXURES 72.

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Page 2
Business Intelligence

Definition:
A term which represents those systems that help companies understand what makes the
wheels of the corporation turn and to help predict the future impact of current decisions.
These systems place a key role in strategic planning process of the corporation. Systems that
exemplify business intelligence include medical research, customer profiling, market basket
analysis, customer contact analysis, market segmentation, scoring, product profitability,
and inventory movement

Business Intelligence provides business roadmaps to deliver solutions for business analysis,
which includes data models, meta-data and analytical applications. By having these roadmaps, we
deliver superior business value through improved return on investment, time value by enabling
fast solution delivery, and technical value through open database.

Information is typically obtained about customer needs, customer decision making processes, the
competition, conditions in the industry, and general economic, technological, and cultural trends.
Business intelligence is carried out to gain sustainable competitive advantage, and is a valuable
core competence in some instances.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a code-name for a range of technologies which unlock knowledge
that is hidden in business data and tell us how to use it more effectively. The overall objectives of
BI are to improve planning, productivity, service quality, and profitability by making information
and data more comprehensible and using business knowledge more effectively. Business
Intelligence helps us to use business data for competitive advantage.

Business Intelligence allows management to gain insight into their business by analyzing business
data to spot trends or using "what-if" analysis for scenario forecasting. BI technologies provide
management with up-to-date information on vital business aspects of their operations.

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Evolution Of Business Intelligence:

Ever since mainframe computers began accumulating vast storehouses of data in the early 1960s,
managers and executives have sought ways to turn random facts and figures into useful
information upon which to base sound business decisions.

But it wasn't until the arrival of relational databases and client/server technology in the early
1990s that companies took advantage of the market's need for decision support systems to create
and define a new industry, which is now widely known as business intelligence (BI). Business
intelligence allows organizations to extract useful, actionable information from a rapidly growing
inventory of disparate data sources, including multiple database platforms, packaged applications,
data warehouses, data marts and e-business systems.

The major database application vendors typically supply basic querying and reporting
functionality for their own products. BI vendors provide tools that can be used across the
organization to access, analyze and share information from a variety of sources -- a giant step in
the right direction for business decision-makers needing the big picture.

As the use of BI has matured, there has been increased interest in analytic applications, a logical
extension of the business intelligence concept. Analytic applications provide users with
prepackaged solutions to common business problems such as customer, sales and campaign
analysis. Although analytic applications have been available in areas such as financial budgeting
for many years, they typically relied on older, proprietary systems and covered only a small
fraction of the overall needs of the enterprise. Over the last few years, analytic applications have
gained popularity in new areas, particularly for the analysis of e-business and click stream
information.

Analytic applications provide key additional BI benefits to specific groups of end users through
the use of "best practice" analysis techniques -- in particular business areas and "closed loop"
integration with operational systems. However, their implementation has not always been
painless. While they address a business need for a particular population, they perpetuate the
problem of stovepipe information sources and may make it more difficult than ever to get an
overall view of the enterprise. As Gartner noted in a May 2001 report: "Packaged BI applications

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may seem appealing in the context of a particular application, but organizations should ensure
that they will support BI in a broader context as a strategic initiative."

Hence the notion of "enterprise analytic applications" which provide a common platform for
analytic applications throughout the organization. The situation is similar to the changes that have
taken place in the packaged operational applications market, where companies first implemented
packaged solutions rather than creating them from scratch (People Soft for human resources, for
example) then quickly demanded integrated systems that tied together operations across the
organization, pioneered by companies such as SAP and rapidly followed by the other vendors.

The chief business benefits of an enterprise analytic applications approach are:

 A single version of the truth across an entire enterprise.

 Predefined best practice analysis techniques in a variety of different business areas.
 A consistent BI strategy that leverages existing resources.

With these constants in mind, let's examine the evolutionary path of enterprise analytic
applications, including where they are today, where they're going and how to create a BI strategy
that works.

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MARKET ANALYSIS
OF
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
SOFTWARE

I. Market Growth For Business Intelligence:

The BI market has experienced modest growth in recent years (5%-10% annually). We expect
this level of growth to increase somewhat, to 10%-15%, in 2004.

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II. Registered strong holds in Business Intelligence

Actuate Business Objects

Cognos Computer Associates

Hummingbird Hyperion

Information Builders Microsoft

MicroStrategy Oracle

PeopleSoft ProClarity

SAP SAS

Siebel

III. Market Share Trend Of The Companies :

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 IV. Comparative Analysis:
2003 2002 2001 2000
(preliminary figures)
Market Share Market Share Market Share Market Share
Vendor position (%) position (%) position (%) position (%)
Microsoft 1 26.1% 1 24.4% 2 21.1% 3 11.5%

Hyperion Solutions (incl Brio) 2 21.9% 2 23.3% 1 24.0% 1 27.4%

Cognos (incl Adaytum) 3 14.2% 3 14.7% 3 13.7% 2 13.5%

Business Objects (incl Crystal) 4 7.7% 4 7.4% 4 7.6% 6 7.4%

MicroStrategy 5 6.2% 5 5.4% 6 6.8% 5 9.1%

SAP 6 5.8% 6 5.2% 7 5.4% 8 2.9%

Oracle 7 4.0% 7 4.7% 5 7.0% 4 9.9%

Cartesis 8 3.1% 9 2.6% 9 2.4% 11 2.2%

Applix 9 3.0% 8 2.6% 8 2.5% 7 3.0%

MIS AG 10 3.0% 12 2.1% 11 2.1% 12 2.1%

Geac 11 2.0% 10 2.2% 10 2.3% 10 2.5%

SAS Institute 12 0.9% 13 1.1% 13 1.2% 13 1.6%

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INDUSTRIAL USE
OF
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

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I. Why should Industries use business intelligence?
Business intelligence enables the industry achieve the following:
Companies achieve returns from business intelligence solutions in three main areas:

 More efficient reporting. Without business intelligence, many companies often have
teams of employees spending time to gather, aggregate, and analyze information from
different systems to provide reports to management. Business intelligence can
significantly reduce the amount of time spent developing reports on different aspects of
the business. What’s the return? Companies can reduce employee time spend developing
reports and reduce finance staff headcount or redeploys finance staff to other activities.

 Improved information for decision-making. Because companies can access, view, and
analyze numbers that were either too unwieldy, distributed, or expensive to access,
managers can get the reports they need to make effective decisions and correct problems.
What’s the return? Companies could used improved reporting information to identify
where they were missing revenue generation opportunities, to reduce overhead costs
based on utilization, and to manage billing and accounts receivables. For example, one
shipping company used business intelligence to analyze shipping information and
determine where it should be charging customers more – and where it could reduce
internal costs.

 Improved customer management. Companies can use business intelligence to identify

customer and market trends and use that information for forecasting, planning, marketing,
and promotions. In cases where a customer is part of a supply chain, companies can also
open access to business intelligence information directly to the customer to reduce
management costs and streamline interaction. Where’s the return? Nucleus found
companies could reduce customer support costs by providing customers with self-service
access to information, or increase profits based on better customer data. For example, one
bank increased its collection rate by using business intelligence to identify delinquent
borrowers.

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II. A few tangible benefits that can be listed are:

 Build profits by targeting profitable activities.

 Increase customer loyalty and retain customers for life.
 Increase the accuracy and timeliness of sales forecasts.
 Achieve budgeted sales.
 Increase the proportion of high-value customers in your customer mix.
 Reduce low-yield activities in the sales process.
 Deploy higher-yield promotions and advertising.
 Predict future behavior of prospects and customers.
 A way to access data in a common format from multiple sources
 A way to measure business goals by analyzing cross-departmental data
 See who the good, bad and ugly customers are at a glance
 Track customer behavior to improve service and relationships
 Track specific product sales across regions and distributors to improve production and
supply
 Track internal business trends to improve processes
 Track external market trends to improve competitiveness
 Fine tune pricing and marketing policies

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 TOOLS USED

IN

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Tools used in BI:

People doing business intelligence have developed tools that ease the work, especially when the
intelligence task involves gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. These are some tools
commonly used for business intelligence:

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  Data warehouses

A data warehouse comprises a computing system used to store information regarding an

organization's activities in a database. The database design favors reporting on and analyzing the
data in order to gain strategic information and to facilitate decision-making.

Data warehouses may hold large amounts of information, sometimes in smaller logical units
called Data marts. Often the schemas of data marts are stored in what are known as "Star
Schemas", or Dimensional Modeling form; however there is no industry standard requiring that
the schemas of data marts be in any particular form. There is, in fact, some controversy about the
most useful form of data mart schemas.

Conventional database systems use highly normalized data formats to ensure consistency of data
and minimal use of space. However this often means that transactions and queries against a fully
normalized database perform slowly. Data warehouses often use a more de-normalized (relaxed)
format. This speeds up queries, and has the additional benefit that the schema will be more
intuitive to non-administrative users as they are exploring it. For example, rather than having a
single record in a table contains customer information, that information may be replicated across
a whole series of tables.

OLAP (online analytical processing) tools are generally designed to work with de-normalized
databases although there are tools that work with special data warehouse schemas stored in third
normal form (normalized).

Data warehouses are usually accessed (queried) via "data marts", which are purpose-specific
access points to or sub-sets of the warehouse. Data marts are designed to answer the probable
queries of a given kind of user.

Normally a data warehouse does not store current information on an individual business activity.
It is often used for collective processing for all business units across a corporation.

Computing in data warehouses is often referred to as Online Analytical Processing

(OLAP), in contrast to Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) -- used for normal
business activities. Data from Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other

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related business software systems is imported into data warehouses periodically for
further processing.

 Data mining

Data mining is the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns. To do
this, data mining uses computational techniques from Statistics and Pattern recognition.

Data mining has been defined as "The nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and
potentially useful information from data" [1] and "The science of extracting useful information
from large data sets or databases" [2]. Although it is usually used in relation to analysis of data,
data mining, like artificial intelligence, is an umbrella term and is used with varied meaning in a
wide range of contexts.

It is also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD).

Used in the technical context of data warehousing and analysis data mining is neutral. However,
it sometimes has a more pejorative usage that implies imposing patterns (and particularly causal
relationships) on data where none exist. This imposition of irrelevant, misleading or trivial
attribute correlation is more properly criticized as "data dredging" in the statistical literature.

Used in this latter sense, data dredging implies scanning the data for any relationships, and then
when one is found coming up with an interesting explanation. (This is also referred to as "over
fitting the model".) The problem is that large data sets invariably happen to have some exciting
relationships peculiar to that data. Therefore any conclusions reached are likely to be highly
suspected. In spite of this, some exploratory data work is always required in any applied statistical
analysis to get a feel for the data, so sometimes the line between good statistical practice and data
dredging is less than clear.

A more significant danger is finding correlations that do not really exist. Investment analysts
appear to be particularly vulnerable to this.

Most data mining efforts are focused on developing a finely grained, highly detailed model of
some large data set. In Data Mining For Very Busy People [3], researchers at West Virginia
University and the University of British Columbia discuss an alternate method that involves

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finding the minimal differences between elements in a data set, with the goal of developing
simpler models that represent relevant data.

There are also privacy concerns associated with data mining. For example, if an employer has
access to medical records, they may screen out people with diabetes or have had a heart attack.
Screening out such employees will cut costs for insurance, but it creates ethical and legal
problems.

Data mining government or commercial data sets for national security or law enforcement
purposes has also raised privacy concerns. [4]

There are many legitimate uses of data mining. For example, a database of prescription drugs
taken by a group of people could be used to find combinations of drugs with an adverse reactions.
Since the combination may occur in only 1 out of 1000 people, a single case may not be apparent.
A project involving pharmacies could reduce the number of drug reactions and potentially save
lives. Unfortunately, there is also a huge potential for abuse of such a database.

Basically, data mining gives information that wouldn't be available otherwise. It must be properly
interpreted to be useful. When the data collected involves individual people, there are many
questions concerning privacy, legality, and ethics.

 Predictive Modeling

Predictive Modeling techniques are used to build models that predict or forecast numerical
outcomes such as sales volume.

 Genetic Algorithms

Genetic Algorithms an advanced algorithmic method can be used to solve complex optimization
problems such as scheduling and logistics.

 Decision Support System:

Decision Support System provides the decision maker with models and data to support decision-
making tasks. These systems can either contain expert knowledge, which has been captured, or
rules and models developed from data. These systems support delegation of decision-making

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authority by distributing knowledge and allow effective decision-making in very complex
situations.

 Intranet Web

Intranet Web technologies make business information available company-wide in a

format that addresses employees’ needs.

Sectors in which BI can be used:

I. Communication:

Business intelligence solutions can be used in communications industry to increase revenue,

reduce operational costs, and increase customer retention. Leading wire line, wireless, broadband,
ISP, and satellite carriers around the world are using BI solution of choice, and in many cases, as
the enterprise standard. BI enables them to:

 Identify and segment customers to enable effective retention and cross-sell strategies
 Integrate management, operational and financial reporting to improve performance
 Improve revenue assurance across the organization

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  Reduce and control operational costs through optimized performance of all resources
 Effectively service customers throughout the multi channel network
 Differentiate themselves by delivering on service level agreements and service quality

II. Customer products:

Business intelligence solutions improve performance in the consumer product goods (CPG)
industry. Our CPG companies include apparel makers; makers of personal and household care
products; food and beverage manufacturers; paper and business forms makers; and pet products
companies. Business intelligence solutions enable CPG companies to:

 Determine profitable trading partners and enable collaborative process improvement

 Integrate management and financial reporting to improve performance
 Reduce and control sales and marketing costs through improved analysis
 Manage assets and improve capital utilization through accurate forecasting and analysis
 Efficiently service customers over the internet

III. Energy:

Energy companies that succeed will be those that can expand into non-traditional markets by
shaping their products and services to new and existing customers.

Business intelligence solutions have helped many energy companies to redefine their business.
By carrying out trend analysis and tracking the day-to-day operations across all parts of the
business, companies can react immediately to market opportunities or threats.

Business intelligence solutions help energy companies in many ways, by enabling them to:

 Optimize the supply chain by providing data access to suppliers, distributors, and
customers to enhance performance and responsiveness (all while reducing costs)
 Improve stock control by providing visibility across the organization and supply chain
to enhance just-in-time management and reduce excess inventory

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  Minimize procurement inefficiencies by analyzing supplier performance, and driving
negotiations and pricing structures
 Respond quickly to market opportunities by tracking and analyzing operational data
from inventory, financial, point-of-sale, and marketing
 Differentiate and refine product offering by analyzing historical information and
assessing product profitability on a geographic basis
 Strengthen customer relationships and increase their value by tracking customer
behavior and service issues, better targeting promotions, and improving service delivery

IV. Financial Services:

Business intelligence solutions improve performance in the banking, brokerage, consumer credit,
investment banking and insurance industries. With our analytical and reporting solutions,
financial services companies can:

 Identify profitable customers and retain them

 Improve management of financial performance
 Automate compliance with reporting standards and regulations
 Efficiently service customers and agents over the internet

V. Government And Public Sector:

Government, public sector, educational and non-profit organizations use BI to track, manage,
understand, and improve mission performance.

Business intelligence solutions enable these organizations to:

 Integrate mission effectiveness and financial performance through enterprise

performance management
 Reduce and control operational costs through improved sourcing, supply chain, and
logistics management
 Implement e-Government initiatives to effectively deliver services over the internet

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  Identify and segment constituents to enable optimal service delivery
 Align human capital with agency and mission requirements

VI. Health Care:

Escalating costs, increased government legislation, and a rapidly aging population, have all
created a significant strain on today's healthcare industry. The challenge is to provide higher
quality customer care while keeping costs to a minimum.

Many leading healthcare organizations are using our business intelligence solutions as a vital
weapon in understanding and managing their critical performance indicators.

Information access and analysis that goes company-wide has numerous benefits. It enables
healthcare businesses to monitor successful treatments and optimize the results for effective
clinical decisions. Accurate information also helps companies to identify efficient service and
workflow practices.

Business intelligence solutions help healthcare companies, by enabling them to:

 Increase workflow efficiencies by analyzing consolidated data from clinical,

administrative, and financial areas
 Improve patient care and optimize resource management by tracking and predicting
healthcare service utilization
 Meet government legislative controls by delivering measured and accountable patient-
centric care metrics
 Monitor and analyze patient diagnosis and condition to facilitate timely and effective
clinical decisions
 Control costs, improve contracting decisions, and eliminate waste by closely
managing inventory and provider performances
 Increase efficiency and detect fraud by analyzing historical information, and tracking
and closely monitoring current claims data

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VIII. Manufacturing:

The goal of today's manufacturing companies is to be recognized as performing "world-class

manufacturing" organizations. This status demands an agile enterprise that is always one step
ahead of the competition.

To ensure competitive advantage, manufacturing companies need to cultivate a responsive

environment and deliver major improvements in lead time, product quality, and lower production
costs.

Business intelligence solutions help manufacturing companies in many ways, by enabling them
to:

 Improve customer relationships and increase their value by closely tracking

purchasing behavior, anticipating demand, and responding faster to changing
requirements
 Respond quickly to changing markets and company sensitivities by integrating,
analyzing, and tracking data from disparate sources
 Accelerate new product time-to-market by integrating decision processes across
engineering design, manufacturing, and marketing departments
 Reduce inventory investment by providing inventory visibility across the supply chain
to enhance just-in-time management
 Improve planning and scheduling by analyzing forecasts, orders, lead times, utilization
throughput, and fill rate, to quickly identify opportunities or threats
 Maintain and develop quality assurance by analyzing product history, to continuously
update and improve quality objectives and get closer to market
 Improve the procurement cycle by analyzing and tracking supplier performance on
critical measures such as order fulfillment time, quality, and accuracy
 Intelligently select and apply world-class techniques by analyzing internal and external
data to understand optimal techniques for individual organizations

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IX. Pharmaceuticals:

With improved access to information via the Internet, increased personal wealth, and longer life
expectancy, consumers today have a greater say in their medical treatment.

These socio-economic factors are driving a demand for groundbreaking new products and they
are dramatically impacting the business dynamics of the global pharmaceutical industry.

Strong growth also brings new challenges. Pharmaceutical companies are under increased
pressure to be first to market, which requires a dramatic reduction in drug development cycles. At
the same time they must contain and reduce operational costs, and comply with increasingly
stringent regulatory controls.

Business Objects BI solutions enable our customers to support faster and more cost-effective
innovation, work more efficiently with collaborative partners, and produce and deliver products
more effectively.

BI solutions help pharmaceuticals companies in many ways, by enabling them to:

 Identify the products that yield the most appropriate results with a clinical trial
research process that segments, tracks, analyzes, and shares test results
 Maximize the supply chain by sharing production information with suppliers, tracking
product quality, optimizing stock replenishment, and monitoring vendor performance
 Optimize campaign creation and implementation by analyzing the effectiveness of
marketing strategies
 Increase sales productivity by understanding sales activities, sales territory, and
representative performances, and by providing customized data access to ensure that
customer relationship management goals are met and exceeded

X. Retail:

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Business intelligence solutions improve performance in the retail sector. Retail Sector include
department stores; discount and outlet stores; supermarkets and convenience stores; consumer
electronics and home furnishings retailers; and catalog and mail order companies. Business
intelligence solutions enable retailers to:

 Improve purchasing, forecasting, and distribution management

 Optimize product profitability and increase effectiveness of marketing campaigns
 Identify and segment customers to enable retention strategies
 Integrate management and financial reporting to improve performance
 Reduce and control operational costs through optimized store performance
 Effectively service customers throughout the multi channel network

Case Study I:

Using the Web to distribute business intelligence is the approach Pfizer Inc. is taking, says
Lawrence Bell, senior manager of the New York-based company's U.S. pharmaceutical
information architecture team. Pfizer's global, distributed operation simply couldn't work out of
one monolithic warehouse that had to distribute information about regional sales trends to sales
and marketing professionals.

To deal with those challenges, Pfizer began using Informix Corp.'s ETL tool, Ardent Datastage,
to create a distributed database running on hubs around the world that could be updated quickly
and accurately on demand.

Pfizer uses a Datastage utility to allow replication on the fly using the Internet's file transfer
protocol so the system can support frequent updates. The system is used to deliver volumes of
data that Pfizer "feeds downstream" to marketing and sales divisions worldwide to help them
evaluate product sales and trends.

Along with the standard business data sources, BI applications also let firms add nontraditional
data sources.

Case Study II:

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The Dallas Teachers Credit Union (DTCU), used geographical data analysis - which draws
information about the physical location of bank customers or prospective customers - to increase
its customer base from 250,000 professional educators to 3.5 million potential customers -
virtually overnight

The increase gave the credit union the ability to compete with larger banks that had a strong
presence in Dallas.

"We're now competitive with Wells Fargo and [Bank of America]," says DTCU Senior Vice
President and CIO Jerry Thompson. "We're even, if not ahead, of the big guys." The sudden
access to a whole new market came from geographical data the DTCU used to find ways to
improve its position.

The DTCU needed to increase its customer base to remain competitive. Changing its status from
a profession-based service to a community-based service would do the trick, but such a change
would require approval from the Texas State Credit Union Commission.

The DTCU needed to whip up a business plan and proposal to present to the commission. And
much of the data in that proposal would have to reflect the credit union's detailed knowledge of
the community's banking habits.

As a first step toward gathering the information it needed for the proposal, the credit union
replaced a financial system with BI applications running on IBM's DB2 Universal Database.
Then it bought supplementary data compiled by Acxiom Corp. in Little Rock, Ark., to correlate
credit scores, lifestyle statistics and locations of residents in the credit union's area, the mix-match
was done to come up with the data that enabled DTCU to build there business plan and proposal
to present to the commission which was approved by the commission. The credit was given to the
BI solution that enabled them get the relevant data

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UNDERSTANDING
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
USING
MICROSTRATEGY 7i

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Understanding BI using MICROSTRATEGY 7i :

During the formative period, companies actively discovered many new ways to use their data
assets for decision support, operational reporting and process optimization. And during this era of
invention, BI technology vendors reacted the way software vendors always react to new evolving
markets – that is, by building niche software to implement each new pattern of application that
companies invented. These patterns of applications resulted in software products centered
exclusively on one Style of BI, as follows:
1. Enterprise Reporting – Report writers were used to generate highly formatted static reports
destined for broad distribution to many people.
2. Cube Analysis – Cube-based BI tools were used to provide simple slice-and-dice analytical
capabilities to business managers.
3. Ad Hoc Query and Analysis – Relational OLAP tools were used to allow power users to
query the database for any answer, slice-and-dice the entire database and surf down to the lowest
level of transactional information.
4. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining – Statistical and data mining tools were used to perform
predictive modeling or to discover the cause-and-effect correlation between two metrics.
5. Report Delivery and Alerting – Report Distribution engines were used to send full reports or
alerts to large user populations based on subscriptions, schedules or threshold events in the
databases.

At this point in time, most leading enterprises have purchased many different BI tool sets from
many different vendors – with each tool targeted at a new BI application and each tool delivering
user functionality focused on only one of the Styles of BI.

One way to look at these different Styles of BI is to place them in a two-dimensional space (Fig.
1) where the vertical axes represents the sophistication and interactivity of the analytical

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processes and the horizontal axis represents scale, or the size of the user population. We can then
locate each of the 5 Styles of BI in a region on the grid, as we see in the figure below.

The most sophisticated and interactive Styles of BI are used by relatively small groups of users
consisting of information analysts and power users, for whom data and analysis are their primary
jobs. Less interactive Styles of BI deliver basic data and results that are applicable to very large
user populations ranging from senior executives all the way to staff personnel. Leading
organizations have recognized the benefits of putting information into the hands of all their
employees, regardless of job title or function. Only the MicroStrategy architecture can deliver all
5 Styles of BI functionality to each and every user within an enterprise, offering different
functionality levels within the 5 Styles of BI tailored for each user.

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The 5 Styles of BI In An Enterprise Application Scenario
It is generally accepted now that from the CEO to the support staff, every employee of leading
organizations analyzes business data to some degree, in some fashion. Their analyses may be
deliberate and exploratory, they may be triggered automatically by threshold conditions or they
may even be so embedded in everyday systems that their existence as BI per se may not even be
recognized. One thing is clear: successful organizations make maximum use of their data assets
through BI technology.
In the following scenario, a typical set of analyses and responses are used to demonstrate the 5
Styles of BI in practice.

BI Style 1: Enterprise Reporting

When an enterprise wishes to distribute standard operational reports or financial reports to all
stakeholders in the organization, Enterprise Reporting is used. Since the 1950s, corporations have
found clear returns on their investment in operational and financial reporting. Consequently,
Enterprise Reporting is the most widespread Style of BI – ranging from its earliest adoption as
mainframe green-and-white banded paper reports to today’s web-based reports.
Consider the following scenario. A store manager receives Store Performance reports generated
weekly by the Report Distribution engine. After a review of one such weekly report on store
sales, the store manager notices that sales for computer peripherals have dropped off significantly
from previous weeks. She clicks on her report and immediately drills to another enterprise report,
which shows her that the 3 best selling hard drives are surprisingly underperforming

BI Style 2: Cube Analysis

Cube Analysis is the Style of BI ideal for basic analysis that can be anticipated in advance. The
analysis of sales by region for certain time periods, and the analysis of sales by product and by
salesperson, for instance, could be useful to store managers looking for some underlying details
on performance. In our scenario, the store manager digs deeper into the issue by running one of
several analysis cubes that
have been pre-built for the store managers. Analysis cubes provide people with a simple and safe
environment that lets novice BI users easily conduct first-order analyses to try to uncover root
causes. This particular store manager’s analysis cube allows her to compare her store’s sales

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results against the sales plan, against sales results at other stores like hers, and against previous
years’ seasonal patterns.
After flipping through various views of the data in her analysis cube, several things become
apparent. The first is that most stores seem to be experiencing this same sudden slowdown in
sales. The second is that this trend will quickly prevent her from achieving her revenue goals for
this product category. And third, this downturn is inconsistent with seasonal sales patterns from
the last 2 years for this kind of product. She concludes that there is a serious problem here, and
that it is a corporate problem not unique to her store. She forwards a link to this analysis cube to a
buyer at HQ, so they can see exactly what she has seen and delve deeper into the problem.

BI Style 3: Ad Hoc Query and Analysis

Ad Hoc Query and Analysis is the Style of BI that enables true investigative analysis of enterprise
data, down to the transaction level of detail. The buyer at HQ accesses the analysis cube but
cannot determine what is happening based solely on predefined comparisons within the cube. The
buyer needs to probe many more areas of the database to determine what is going on, and uses Ad
Hoc Query and Analysis techniques to accomplish this. In our scenario, the buyer runs a
parameterized, or prompted, report that lets him create an ad hoc report simply by answering
some initial questions. His prompt answers automatically generate a report of inventory data for
North America for the previous 2 months for the specific SKUs in question. He sees that there has
been a steady stream of shipments from the warehouses to the stores, but also that a stoppage in
warehouse replenishment has caused a depletion of inventory in the warehouses. He concludes
that the problem lies somewhere further back in the supply chain. Next, he drills down from the
inventory report to a shipping report that indicates all seaborne shipments from Taiwan have been
delayed, affecting the SKUs in question, as well as some other SKUs. He determines that the
other SKUs likewise will soon experience a shortfall in sales. He informs the VP of Sales and all
store managers of the results of his analysis, and sends the reports to the marketing department to
determine the significance of the shipment delays on the company’s revenue
and profits for the quarter.

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BI Style 4: Statistics and Data Mining
Statistics & Data Mining is the Style of BI used to uncover subtle relationships (e.g. price
elasticity) and forecast projections (e.g. sales trends), using set theory techniques, statistical
treatment and other advanced mathematical functions. In our scenario, an analyst in the marketing
department builds a model of the product line’s revenue and gross margins for the quarter as a
function of shipment times, pricing and demand. After estimating the financial impact of the
delayed shipments, the analyst recommends raising the price on the remaining items in stock to
help cover the lost margins. She also recommends some new promotional spending to substitute
alternative hard drives through a combination of in-store marketing and advertising.

BI Style 5: Report Delivery & Alerting

A Report Delivery and Alerting engine allows enterprises to distribute vast numbers of reports or
messages on a proactive and centralized basis, as well as allowing users to self-subscribe to report
distributions. Report distribution can be initiated on a scheduled basis, as well as on an event-
triggered basis, such as a metric’s value falling below a target threshold. In our scenario, a task
force continuously monitors the progress of new sales programs by subscribing to a distribution
service that continuously measures sales performance of relevant SKUs, their margin
performance and the costs for the new promotions. The service also continuously monitors the
inventory levels in the warehouses and alerts all stakeholders as soon as the shipment delays are
over, signaling that pricing and promotion should return to normal. Together, the team is able to
make intelligent decisions, respond quickly to changing events, and preserve the company’s
exceptional level of performance.

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The Problem with Multiple BI Tools for Different Styles of BI
There are five macro forces that are obsolescing the “strategy” of isolated departmental islands of
BI and the use of disparate departmental BI tools.

Problem 1.
Enterprise BI Applications Need to Access More Data and Support More Users –
Departmental BI Lacks User and Data Scalability. Most companies have captured the low-
hanging ROI fruit with their current array of departmental
BI applications. Based on the almost universal success of these applications, companies are now
emboldened to take it to the next level. And that means delivering much richer reports and
analysis, from much larger pools of data and delivered to many more users. Unfortunately,
departmental BI tools today cannot scale to these new levels. The very nature of their underlying
architecture prohibits them from analyzing terabytes of data and delivering to expanding user
bases. Companies need an industrial-strength BI platform designed for scale to replace
departmental BI tools designed solely for interface functionality.
MICROSTRATEGY
Enterprise BI
Lowe'

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Problem 2.
Inconsistent Versions of the Truth Are Propagating Through the Enterprise – Multiple
Islands of BI Result In Multiple Inconsistent Metadata Repositories. Multiple independent
islands of departmental BI applications work fine when the number of applications is small.
When there are few applications, there is little overlap in analytical or reporting domains;
inconsistencies in data definitions, in metric usage and business model are not readily evident.
However when the number of BI applications achieves a certain critical mass within the
enterprise, there is an inevitable overlap in analytical and reporting domains. It becomes
inevitable that multiple reports from multiple independent BI applications present inconsistent
information, preventing a consistent version of the truth. As the number of applications increases,
these inconsistencies undermine the integrity of all the BI applications.

Problem 3.
Users Are Increasingly Dissatisfied About Being Forced to Use Multiple BI Tools – Multiple
User Interfaces Are Problematic. When the number of BI applications is few, any given person
only uses one of those applications, and hence only uses the one BI technology associated with
that application. As the number of BI applications increases, more and more people will be
accessing multiple BI applications, and hence using multiple different BI user interfaces to view
reports and manipulate those reports. This means that BI users need to learn different ways to do
everything, including such common actions as finding reports, running reports, scheduling
reports, editing reports, saving reports, sharing reports, answering prompts, sorting the data and
pivoting the data. With two different tools, users will face challenges. With three different tools,
users will be reluctant or unable to use the multiple applications. With four or five different tools,
this becomes a valid reason for user rebellion.

Problem 4.
IT Organizations Cannot Afford the Excessive Cost of Managing Multiple BI Technologies–
Disparate BI Technologies for Multiple BI Applications Are Burdensome. Finally, IT
organizations suffer excessive redundant costs in managing many diverse BI technologies. With
multiple BI tools, companies need to train people in the development and operational intricacies
of each BI technology. Companies must establish technical support teams to specialize in each
capability. Companies must manage contracts with each BI vendor. Companies must go to
conferences, user groups and support forums for each BI vendor. Companies must coordinate

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new version upgrades with their versions of database software, server operating systems,
workstation operating systems, browsers, web servers and firewalls. Companies must manually
synchronize metadata overlaps between multiple BI technologies – such as security, business
definitions, metric definitions and user profiles. Only with a single BI architecture can a company
avoid all of these redundant costs and efforts. Only the MicroStrategy architecture can deliver all
5 Styles of BI with the enterprise scale of data and user populations, in turn freeing up time, effort
and money.

I. The Ideal Architecture for Delivering All 5 Styles of BI

The ideal architecture for delivering all 5 Styles of BI is one that can deliver:
1. Any or all Styles of BI which can be mixed-and-matched seamlessly for the end users,
where the addition of each new BI Style adds functionality to the users’ existing reports
2. All expressed through a single unified user interface to maximize ease of use and user
acceptance
3. All delivered on top of a single integrated backplane that unifies the metadata, security and
user profiles, ensuring a single version of the truth throughout the enterprise and thus minimizing
administration and maintenance efforts by IT

The MicroStrategy architecture was completely rebuilt from the ground up from 1996
through 2000 to achieve precisely this range of flexibility, along with unparalleled scalability –
all the things that companies need for industrial-strength BI.

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The MicroStrategy architecture stands alone in the BI market space as the one integrated
architecture, built from the ground up to deliver all 5 Styles of BI with the level of scalability and
manageability suitable for enterprise BI applications and capabilities.

A. Enterprise Reporting:
Enterprise Reporting is designed for information consumers; individuals at all organizational
levels and across all job functions in the enterprise and also include supply chain partners and
even customers. Enterprise Reporting, in essence, provides business intelligence to the masses.
As a result, it is the most prevalent Style of BI, encompassing a vast array of operational
reporting directly from ERP an CRM systems, as well as scorecards and dashboards of overall
business performance.
The single most dominant characteristic of any Enterprise Reporting system is its ability to
produce highly flexible report formats, so that data can be presented in whatever form is most
consumable to a wide range of information consumers. These individuals get their reports by
accessing them on-demand through their Web browsers (web-based reporting), as well as by
receiving distributions that are pushed to them via email or print delivery.
Enterprise Reporting technologies revolve around the following key areas:
1. Support For All Forms of Enterprise Reports – From scorecards and dashboards at one
extreme, all the way to operational reports at the other extreme, and the many variations in
between. Report writing products typically either can deliver operational reports well or can
deliver scorecards and dashboards well – but not both. MicroStrategy’s advanced architecture is
designed to deliver both operational reports and scorecards and dashboards easily from a single

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platform. In fact, MicroStrategy allows users easily to develop the five common forms of
enterprise reports that range from highly graphical Scorecards and Dashboards for executives to
densely populated tabular Operational Reports for all personnel. In between these extremes are
Classic Business Reports for business unit managers, Managed Metrics reports for business unit
leaders and Invoices and Statements for customers and partners.

Delivering The Five Common Forms of Enterprise Reports – Ranging from Scorecards and
Dashboards to Operational Reports

Report Form 1 – Scorecards and Dashboards for executives: Scorecards and dashboards (Fig.
6) are designed to deliver maximum visual impact to the user in a format optimized for quick
absorption. MicroStrategy scorecards combine tables, graphs, gauges and other graphical
indicators, conditional formatting, free-form labels, borders and background colors to achieve this
impact.

Report Form 2 – Operational Reports for all personnel: The vast majority of enterprise
information dissemination is in the form of traditional Operational Reports (Fig. 7). These time-

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tested reports display volumes of tabular data organized into a hierarchy of increasingly finer
levels of detail.

Report Form 3 – Classic Business Reports for business managers: MicroStrategy’s free-form
layout may be used to create popular business reports, such as P&L reports, performance reports
and statutory reports. These reports are usually optimized for on-screen viewing and allow the
user to drill to deeper details and related reports. Classic Business Reports (Fig. 8) easily combine
tables, graphs and freeform field layout to create unique presentations of summary and detailed
data.

Report Form 4 – Managed Metrics Reports for business unit leaders: The drive to manage
business “by the numbers” and deliver predictable results has lead to a renewed interest in
Corporate Performance Management, or CPM. The cornerstone of CPM is the Managed Metrics

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Report (Fig. 9), which allows managers to track continually the status of business performance,
including actual-to-planned comparisons, time series projections and process flow analyses. With
MicroStrategy, this is achieved using thresholds and graphical indicators to show attainment of
performance goals, trends over time and status checks to manage to the metrics or targets. By
incorporating predictive analysis native to the MicroStrategy platform, these reports can also
display correlations and projections to help anticipate future business performance.

Report Form 5 – Invoices and Statements for customers and partners: Invoices and
Statements (Fig. 10) contain detailed transactional data and summarized information for any
number of customers and partners. This enterprise report form is designed with page layout
precisely defined and report elements precisely formatted and positioned to ensure proper printing
across multiple sheets and with pre-printed corporate stationery. To generate Invoices and
Statements, MicroStrategy uses the same exacting page layout techniques as those used by
desktop publishing packages.

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B. User-defined Web Reporting
The goal of every Enterprise Reporting project is to inspire people to use information in their day-
to-day work activities. However, most projects fail to achieve this goal because the reports are not
immediately relevant to each recipient user – that is, a user must sift through reams of numbers to
find just the few sections that directly relate to his or her area of responsibility. The other reason
reporting efforts fail to
achieve their goals is because the Enterprise Reporting environment is not easily tuned to the
diverse skills of a wide population of users – that is, the user interface is either too simple and
appeals only to the most novice users, or it is too “feature-rich” and overpowers the novice users.

This is a very difficult technical challenge and most BI products fail miserably because they do
not give the people enough control over the report contents and their Enterprise Reporting
environment, nor do these products automatically tailor report content to fit the users interests and
skill. MicroStrategy was designed specifically to solve this problem through four personalization
levers:

Parameterized Reporting – Letting the User Define the Report Contents

Parameter-driven reports allow the user to answer a number of questions prior to running a report,
and those answers dictate what content will be displayed in the report. It allows a user to generate

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just the data they are interested in seeing at that moment. For example, users may answer prompt
questions such as “Which product would you like to analyze,” and “Over what period of time,”
and “In which geographical areas,” and “For which customers.” This is the basic idea behind
parameterized reporting, and many report writing products offer this basic level of user control.
MicroStrategy has taken the basic idea of parameterized reporting and user prompting – and
elevated it to new levels of user control.

Automatically Customized Content – Allowing One Report to Serve The Needs Of

Thousands Of Users Automatically Through Role-based Content
A common challenge in Enterprise Reporting is how to deliver similar information to very large
populations of users economically, where each user needs to see a different slice of the data. The
traditional solution is to provide each user with a custom-designed report. Clearly this is a
nightmare for the report designers because one small change needs to ripple through many
renditions of the report. With MicroStrategy, IT administrators only need to create one report that
the system automatically slices into the different views appropriate for each individual user. In
addition, MicroStrategy content slicing takes place along any number of business attributes based
automatically on each user’s role and group affiliations.

Personalized User Interface Based on User Profile – Matching User Interface Functionality
Level With User Skill Level
Enterprises face a challenge when striking a balance between exposing rich functionality to
power users, while at the same time giving novice users a simple Enterprise Reporting
environment that will not overpower
them. MicroStrategy is designed to solve this problem elegantly through the user of user profiles.
User profiles automatically adjust the Web interface to accommodate users with different skill
levels. User profiles determine exactly what functionality will be exposed to each user or user
group (Fig. 15). So it’s easy in MicroStrategy to give report designers a user profile with
maximum functionality, while the report consumers receive a user profile with just enough
functionality to do their jobs easily.

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C. Multi-lingual Support
Enterprise Reporting must span the globe with reports personalized to the local languages in
which they are accessed. With MicroStrategy, users can access their Enterprise Reporting
environment in twelve different languages out-of-the-box: American English, British English,
Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. MicroStrategy report translation includes all of the interface
items like menu bars and online help. It also includes character sets, currency formats, time and
date formats, and even business attributes and metrics in the report .

High Throughput Report Production and Distribution

Information consumers are everywhere. They are in executive offices, in office cubicles, on
warehouse floors, at loading docks, at customer sites, at suppliers’ offices, and at customers’
homes. Effective Enterprise Reporting systems must be able to reach all of these users, wherever
they are and with sufficient power to generate tens of thousands of reports per hour if needed. The
MicroStrategy architecture sets the standard for high volume, high flexibility report distribution.
MicroStrategy reports can be automatically distributed to the widest range of user touch points on
the market, including Web browsers, networked printers, email, networked file servers, and

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corporate portals MicroStrategy reports can be delivered directly to any Web browser, both inside
and outside the corporate firewalls because MicroStrategy is the only vendor employing a true
zero footprint Web architecture, which requires no downloads, ActiveX, or cookies.
MicroStrategy’s unified Web interface is proven efficient and effective with user populations in
excess of 100,000 individuals internal and external to the enterprise. MicroStrategy reports can
also be printed in a batch production mode. This is a mode where every individual print job
might be directed to a different networked printer that is associated with each recipient user. And,
the content will be automatically personalized to each recipient on his or her printer.

II. CUBE ANALYSIS

Cube Analysis delivers the simplest form of analysis, allowing anybody to analyze data. Cube
Analysis is used most often by people like managers who have a deep interest in understanding
the root causes underlying the data in reports, but do not possess skills for full ad hoc
investigation of the databases. Cube Analysis lets people flip through a series of report views,
using the now standard OLAP features of: page-by, pivot, sort, filter, and drill up/down. These
OLAP features, which were first introduced in the early 1990s, allow users to slice-and-dice a
cube of data, or analysis cube, using simple mouse-clicks. The term “cube” refers to a subset of
highly interrelated data that is pre-organized to allow users to combine any attributes in the

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cube (e.g. stores, products, customers, suppliers) with any metrics in the cube (e.g. sales,
profit, units, age) to create various 2-dimensional views, or slices, that can be displayed on a
computer screen.

MicroStrategy’s Intelligent Cubes provide all of the same OLAP functionality that small-scale
MOLAP cubes provide, but with significant enhancements available only with a ROLAP
underlying architecture.

Speed-of-Thought Report Analysis and Manipulations

MicroStrategy’s Intelligent Cube technology lets users perform report manipulations on a multi-
dimensional cache of data rather than a limited, proprietary cube database. These caches are
instantly populated by the simple action of “running a cube” and remain in shared cache for as
long as the data is valid and people are using it. This eliminates the entire IT overhead imposed
by managing cube farms.

Intelligent Cubes Provide Speed-of-Thought User Information

Intelligent Cubes give users a much greater range of functionality. With Intelligent Cubes, people
can quickly add or remove report objects and modify report-filtering criteria with drag-and-drop
actions in the Web interface. Additionally, users can add new calculations or modify existing
calculations on the fly with an Excel-like formula bar, utilizing the full power of MicroStrategy’s

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Library of Statistical and Mathematical Functions.1 All of these convenient user actions –
adding/removing objects to/from a
report, filtering a report with new criteria, and creating new metrics – do not require going back
to the database and are performed with speed-of-thought response time.

Minimized Administrative Costs and Workload

MicroStrategy automatically creates Intelligent Cubes when users view or edit reports.
MicroStrategy empowers users to create and modify their own cube definitions at any time, from
any Web browser, and without administrative help. Users create and modify cube definitions by
simply dragging-and-dropping report objects, such as business attributes and metrics. At that
point, MicroStrategy automatically generates optimized structured query language (SQL) to
create the Intelligent Cube. MicroStrategy intuitively uses the appropriate Intelligent Cube or
creates a new Intelligent Cube on the fly to satisfy any user’s ad hoc request.
Users can modify existing Intelligent Cubes by adding or removing business attributes and
metrics from across all enterprise business dimensions or creating new calculations on the fly
from existing metrics in an Intelligent Cube. The new calculation is performed without submitting
a new request to the database. Users can also filter their view of the data within an Intelligent
Cube.

Cube Sharing with Personalized Views and Security

IT administrators struggle with maintaining and managing multiple cubes with duplicated data
across user desktops, Web servers, file servers and other locations. The architectures of other BI
software spread data across multiple systems within the enterprise. Consequently, users are at risk
of analyzing outdated data on their desktops and using different analytical definitions of the same
business terms due to decentralization of information across physical cubes of data. Thus, cube-
based BI users cannot reliably share insights because dissimilar numbers can show up on the
same report definitions.

Easy Sharing Of Intelligent Cubes Data With Centralized Metadata and Server
Architecture
Only the MicroStrategy architecture is structured on a centralized and unified metadata that stores
all business terms and data warehouse object definitions in one location. All information about

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reporting and analysis applications, users, reports, metrics and filters are stored in the metadata
and can be shared by all users through
the MicroStrategy architecture’s centralized server. When an administrator creates a new
Intelligent Cube, all users can access it instantaneously. Business terms and definitions are
standardized across the enterprise. When multiple users with the same security levels run the
same report, they get the same data. These users can also share this information easily with other
internal and external users simply by saving the reports in a shared folder. Since these shared
folders are also stored in a central location, all system users can easily access saved reports over
the Web or on the Windows desktop. Additionally, users can email reports directly from the Web.

Sharing Intelligent Cubes Data With Personalized Views

When analyzing Intelligent Cube data, users can add, edit and remove business attributes and
metrics. These actions result in various personalized views of the same Intelligent Cube. Users
can then save these views so that the next time they run the Intelligent Cube, it will reflect their
personal view. Thus, a report designer can deploy one Intelligent Cube shared y all users, each
with a personalized view. Hence, all personalized views are logically linked to the single
published report; and, regardless of the view, all users are accessing the same upto-date data.

Secure Sharing of Intelligent Cubes

IT administrators can be assured that Intelligent Cubes are shared securely because they use
MicroStrategy’s same multi-tiered security that applies to all Styles of BI with MicroStrategy. As
a simplified example, an administrator can design a report with ten business attributes and
metrics. Both John and Martha can share the same Intelligent Cube data, but Martha can view all
ten objects and John can view only six of the ten since his security profile denies him access to
the additional four objects to which Martha has access.

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III. AD HOC QUERY AND ANALYSIS
Ad Hoc Query and Analysis is the Style of BI designed for information explorers and power users
who need full investigative power against all enterprise data. These users require the ability to see
any possible combination of data. If it were feasible to pre-design reports that covered every
possible combination of data, then Ad Hoc Query and Analysis would not be needed. Practically
speaking, this is impossible. Pre-defining reports with all possible permutations would require the
design tens of thousands and even millions of reports depending on the extent of the database. It
would also require the addition of hundreds or thousands of new reports each time a new attribute
is added to the database. The MicroStrategy architecture was designed from its very roots to
provide the most robust Ad Hoc Query and Analysis capability in the industry. The
MicroStrategy architecture allows users to create their own new ad hoc reports using the entire
relational database as the source. MicroStrategy is founded on the Relational OLAP technology
that allows users to perform full OLAP analysis against the entire relational database. The
MicroStrategy architecture distinguishes itself from all other BI architectures in key areas of Ad
Hoc Query and Analysis application:

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Parameter-driven Reporting and Guided Analysis
Parameter-driven reporting functionality allows people to customize the content and layout of any
given report within a range of variations defined by certain factors or parameters. The
MicroStrategy architecture provides the richest range of parameterization available, allowing one
report design to manifest itself in more variations than with any other BI technology.
Customizing Report Content Based on User Input at Run-time
With MicroStrategy, novice users can create sophisticated custom reports on the fly, defining
report content by selecting metrics and business criteria at run time – simply by answering
prompted questions. This allows enterprises to translate complex database query parameters into
a set of simple questions that guide
users

Ad Hoc Report Permutations By Varying User Inputs

What makes parameterized reporting truly useful is when the users have the ability to iterate
quickly through many parameter sequences and to save their sequenced answers for future use.
Users can re-run the same report with different parameter combinations as they refine their
analysis. Furthermore, the basic analytical workflow is embedded in the parameter sequence as a
series of hierarchical questions. Once a user has identified a truly useful report based on a set of

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specific prompt answers, he or she can save that report with the prompts already answered in
exactly the same way, thus generating a new ad hoc report. This lets each user save a full set of
new reports that are simply useful pre-defined combinations of one parameterized report.
Ultimately, through this process, the users get to decide which parameter combinations are useful
through their actual day-to-day work, and can save the most useful combinations for future use
and sharing across a workgroup or the enterprise.

Drill Anywhere Allows Users to Surf the Entire Database, Creating New Ad Hoc Reports
Dynamically Through the Drilling Process
MicroStrategy users can surf the full range of enterprise data with an intuitive right-click drilling
menu (Fig. 28). For example, they can drill from the quarterly regional sales to the customers’
daily transactions at individual stores. From there, users can drill to the most profitable customers
who shop in that particular store and to the products purchased by these profitable customers for
cross-selling opportunities. The process for moving down or up a hierarchy to more- or less-
detailed data is commonly called drill down and drill up, respectively. The capability to shift to
other hierarchies – for example, replacing customer with supplier – is called drill across.
Collectively, the ability to perform any one or combination of drill down, drill up, and drill across
actions – at any level of detail, anywhere in the database – is referred to as Drill Anywhere.

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IV. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining is targeted at professional information analysts, individuals
who regularly perform correlation analysis, trend analysis, and projections. This advanced Style
of BI is achieved by applying mathematical, financial and statistical functions against enterprise
data. The business insight derived from Statistical Analysis and Data Mining is critical for every
enterprise. However, specialized data mining tools are difficult to use – only statisticians with
technical training are able to use them. Instead, MicroStrategy’s BI technology was designed
specifically to deliver much of the common functionality of data mining tools – and to deliver it
in a way that is familiar and consistent with everyday business intelligence usage.
MicroStrategy’s Statistical Analysis and Data Mining features include the following

Applying Statistics and Data Mining Against the Entire Database and for All Users – Using
MicroStrategy’s Comprehensive Library of Statistical and Mathematical Functions
MicroStrategy users can apply any of over 200 mathematical, OLAP, financial, and statistical
functions against the entire volume of data collected in the enterprise data warehouse. The
MicroStrategy architecture accomplishes this through its highly sophisticated SQL Generation
Engine as well as by its specialized Analytic Engine that supplements the database’s calculation
capabilities. By contrast, other BI technologies have far fewer native functions than
MicroStrategy, and those functions can only be applied to the limited data volumes present in
proprietary cube databases. Due to their inherent data limitations, cube-based BI architectures are
incapable of providing a comprehensive picture of the inter-relationships of data across the
enterprise.
For example, telecommunications and financial services enterprises log millions of records every
day. These enterprises can only gain insight into their records if they can directly access the
transaction level data. One MicroStrategy telecommunications customer discovered new insights
into customer calling patterns, resulting in cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars every

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month. This level of analysis and subtlety of insight could not be detected in the usual aggregated
monthly analysis typical of cube-based BI tools.

Plug-and-Play Architecture for Custom Analytical Functions

Many enterprises have unique and proprietary calculations that are needed because of the unique
and proprietary character of their business model. Whether it’s some unique calculation of
productivity, or a unique correlation formula relating sales to promotions, or price elasticity
coefficients, all companies have some business calculations that are not simply standard
mathematical functions. Interestingly, these also tend to be some of the most critical business
questions that a BI system should be able to address. This is where custom analytic functions
become very important.

MicroStrategy’s Extensible Architecture For Plugging in Custom-built Functions

The MicroStrategy architecture is open and extensible, allowing enterprises to create their own
custom analytic functions, and embed those functions in any BI report or analysis (Fig. 34).
MicroStrategy accomplishes this using a step-by-step Plug-In Wizard to make it simple for
average people to create new analytics for the enterprise or their workgroups. Once a custom
analytic function is added to the MicroStrategy Library, it can be used just like any other
function. Users do not need to learn multiple tools to achieve their analysis goal.

Seamless Integration with Data Mining Tools

The main purpose of data mining is to discover patterns and algorithms in the existing data that
can be used to predict future outcomes. This includes analysis techniques such as regression,
segmentation, clustering, and forecasting. Typically, whenever business users need sophisticated
predictive functionality, they must contact a highly skilled developer to assist with their request
using a formal data-mining tool. Mathematicians, statisticians and administrators then “discover”
the appropriate algorithms using data mining tools along with a subset of the actual data by
“training” the data-mining tool. Unfortunately, a recurring problem with this basic model is that
each analysis tends to be a one-time event. That is, the new algorithms are not generally available
to all users through their standard BI reporting or analysis system– instead the separate data
mining processes delivers a series of one-time answers to the requester.

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Sophisticated Analytic Collaboration with Relational Databases
The MicroStrategy Analytic Engine operates collaboratively with the calculation engines
embedded in the relational database management system (RDBMS). Not all databases have the
same calculation capabilities. There are some important analytical functions that some databases
simply do not support and other
analytic functions that database systems cannot do quickly. To overcome this, the MicroStrategy
Analytic Engine automatically compensates for variations in calculation capabilities of the
different database systems– allocating calculation responsibilities to the database syste when it
can be best done in there, and reserving the calculation for MicroStrategy when the database
system can not accomplish it quickly.

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V. REPORT DELIVERY AND ALERTING
Report Delivery and Alerting is the Style of BI designed to proactively distribute large numbers
of reports and alerts to potentially very large populations of information consumers – both
internal and external to the enterprise. With such a broad mandate, Report Delivery and Alerting
must be highly flexible and functional. Most BI vendors offer products that support a minimal
form of Report Delivery and Alerting. That is, most BI vendors offer products that can centrally
distribute emails to large user populations, with report enclosures, and on a scheduled basis. The
MicroStrategy architecture also supports this minimal functionality, but further distinguishes
itself by supporting an additional four key areas:

Report Distribution Through Any Touchpoint

MicroStrategy reports can be automatically distributed through the widest range of user
touchpoints on the market, including email, Web browsers, networked printers, networked file
servers, and corporate portals. With email distribution, MicroStrategy can display the report
contents directly in HTML, or can enclose the report as an attachment in the form of an Excel,
Rich Text Format (RTF), or Portable
Document Format (PDF) file. And with MicroStrategy, these attachment files can automatically
be zipped and password protected. With networked printer distribution, reports can be sent
directly to networked printers around the world automatically. The report is formatted in the
print-perfect PDF format and sent to all of the printers defined by each recipient user’s
preferences. With networked file server distribution, MicroStrategy can distribute reports
directly to archival file servers anywhere on the network. With each new file distribution, the
system can automatically create new archive folders, thereby allowing companies to keep a
historical record of all standard reports. With corporate portal distribution, MicroStrategy can
distribute reports directly to Web portals. This allows companies to concentrate all information
publishing and consumption on their corporate portals, thereby offering a one-stop-shop for all
standard company information.

Self-subscription as well as Administrator-based Distribution

All competent Report Delivery and Alerting technologies are able to distribute reports when a
central administrator manages the entire distribution process. In this case, the central

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administrator establishes all distribution services and assigns all users to receive various reports at
various times. Any user who wants to be included in a weekly report distribution contacts the
central administrator and requests to be
put on the distribution list. Obviously this model has severe practical drawbacks as the number of
users gets very large, as each user has a different distribution profile, and as users continually add
and delete reports from their distribution profile. The central administrator becomes the central
bottleneck. MicroStrategy avoids this problem by also allowing users to self-subscribe to reports
– without the need for
any administrator intervention. This eliminates the dependence on a central administrator and
allows users to continually change which reports they want to receive and when. With
MicroStrategy, end users even have the ability to subscribe other end users to receive reports too,
so a manager can subscribe her subordinates to receive a weekly report that she deems important
for her group. Self-subscription over the Web with MicroStrategy greatly reduces administration
costs while enabling applications to be deployed to extremely large user communities. For
example, an IT administrator can create one parameterized report and instantly deploy it to all
users, letting each user customize the report with his or her own parameters instead of designing and
sending unique reports individually to each user. Moreover, centrally maintained MicroStrategy security
profiles ensure that users do not receive any information to which they are not entitled.

Delivery On-demand, On-schedule or On-event

MicroStrategy users and administrators have complete control over the timing of all their report
distributions. In the simplest case, users and administrators can establish a periodic distribution
for any report (on schedule), such as every Monday morning at 8:00 AM, or every other
Tuesday, or the first Friday of every month. In addition, users can establish subscriptions for
themselves as well as establish them for other people as long as they have the security privilege
allowing them to do so. Users also have the ability to distribute a report to others immediately (on
demand). In this scenario, a user freely can customize a report with pivoting, page by, drill
anywhere, etc. and then immediately send that report result to any other user of the system. The
recipient will see exactly the report that the sender saw prior to sending
Finally, MicroStrategy report distributions can be triggered based on an event that occurs in the
database itself (on event). This might include new data being loaded into the database or even
something as precise as a metric in the database exceeding some pre-established threshold value.
The event-based distribution capability is critical for real time alerting applications.

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Automatic Content Personalization
One of the biggest problems with any report distribution system is making large amounts of
general information relevant to all recipients. Most people are only interested in a small slice of
data contained with-in a standard report. That slice might be one product, or one region, or one
time period. But each recipient receives all data on all products, for all regions, and for all time
periods because that’s the way the report was generically designed. MicroStrategy avoids the
common pitfalls of generic reports by providing four levels of content personalization, ensuring
that content is automatically personalized for each recipient.

Conclusion:
The MicroStrategy architecture is unique in the BI industry.

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• It is the only architecture that supports all 5 Styles of BI in a mix and match fashion, allowing
customers to implement just the functionality they need, whenever they need it.
• It is the only architecture that delivers all 5 Styles of BI through a unified user interface that is
simple enough for novice users, and powerful enough for the most advanced users.
• It is the only architecture that delivers all 5 Styles of BI on a single unified backplane that
ensures rapid development time, minimum maintenance effort, a single version of the truth
throughout the enterprise, and 24 x 7 operation.
Ultimately, the MicroStrategy architecture is future-proof. Companies can start small with limited
functionality and limited scale, but can grow to include all BI functionality, with the highest
scalability, highest performance and best reliability.

Case Study:
Esporta Passes Fitness Test with New Technology to Gain and Retain Members
Esporta Health and Fitness, the premium family fitness and racquets operator identified that
improved IT would help its 66 clubs generate and retain more individual and corporate members.
Solutions provider DPR Consulting developed a Business Intelligence solution based on

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Microsoft data mining technology. It is enabling Esporta to take a single view of its customer
base and make better decisions regarding its marketing spend. The health and fitness operator is
now equipped with better knowledge of its customers’ behavior enabling more informed decision-
making.

Situation
For a rapidly growing industry like health and fitness, customer information has largely been
difficult to get hold of. Convincing busy people to take time out to go to the gym is one
challenge, but finding ways of keeping them at a club is nearly impossible without a good
understanding of who they are.

With 260,000 members at 66 clubs, Esporta knows how hard this can be. Esporta had two
problems. First, the health and fitness chain had no accurate data on how long it took to turn a
prospect into a customer, or how to accurately measure the costs involved. It spent a great deal of
time and money on marketing campaigns, without having any reliable insight as to whether or not
they were working.

Nick Moran, Group Sales Manager, Esporta, says: “We couldn’t make accurate, informed
decisions on which to base our marketing spend. While we could pull together basic marketing
reviews, we had no visibility in terms of where certain membership enquiries were coming from.”

Esporta needed a solution that would allow it to measure marketing timescales, speed, and
success of campaigns, and use these figures to generate new sales and marketing campaigns.

Second, the club needed a better view of its customers to understand their habits, establish the
customers likely to remain at the club, those showing signs of leaving and so on. “We were
reliant on accuracy of information sent through in a prompt and timely fashion from our clubs,”
says Moran. “This was not good use of our time or their time and slowed the process down.”

One of Esporta’s potential business areas is corporate membership. But Esporta was unable to
understand which companies their members worked for as much of this information was
decentralized. As a result there were clear risks in permitting certain clubs to offer corporate
memberships for fear of a dilution of membership income.

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Solution
Esporta called on solutions provider DPR Consulting to help it develop a Business
Intelligence solution, based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services integrated
server software. This solution, called ‘First Contact’ went live in April 2002.
“We went to DPR as I was pleased with the work they have done for me in the past,” says Jon
Forster, Group Head of IT, Esporta. “We were looking for a Microsoft solution as the case studies
I’d seen were positive and we wanted to standardize on a Microsoft platform to support any
future technological developments.”

First Contact is a contact management system, which enables users to monitor a single view of
customer data from all 66 clubs. It takes data from the organization’s existing ACT! contact
management system and uses Data Transformation Services to deliver it into SQL Server.

Using a simple ProClarity interface and Microsoft Excel, users can analyze this information via
Microsoft Analysis Services—a powerful way of analyzing data without restriction. Multi-
dimensional data representations called online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes enable the
sales and marketing team to look at customer data from multiple viewpoints. It is possible to
‘slice and dice’ the cubes of information to get different views of data quickly.

Dan Wakefield, Microsoft Solutions Director, DPR, says: “We gave Esporta an analysis system
that tells it how successful its marketing campaigns are and how much they cost. It enables the
organization to market more effectively, knowing that there is a bit of science behind it.”

Phase two of the solution, which went live in April 2003, is a Membership Analysis System—
used by sales and marketing to assist in retaining customers. It determines the habits of its
members, such as those who are most profitable, their routines, and behavior.

“Esporta can forecast what it needs to do to keep the membership levels up,” says Wakefield. “It
can forecast the member ‘drop-out’ rate and drive a new campaign aimed at replacing them.”

The creation of a second information cube allows the 66 clubs to report like-for-like figures on
corporate membership at a touch of a button. This enables the company to establish how many
members work for one organization and compare this across the whole estate. Esporta can now
evaluate the potential for membership growth by offering a wider corporate scheme to UK wide
organizations, helping the business and its members.

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The solution takes data from the organization’s DRL membership system—which holds all
membership details—and delivers it via Data Transformation Services to SQL Server Analysis
Services.

Benefits
Saving Costs through Better Marketing
Esporta has already reaped the benefits of implementing the First Contact solution—using the
data-mining tool to identify marketing issues that need addressing.

Forster says: “We used to spend thousands and thousands on certain types of marketing. We don’t
do that any more, as we are better at judging whether or not these decisions will be effective.”

Moran says: “We have definitely saved money. Before the implementation we adopted a semi-
educated ‘finger in the air’ approach. We have had a number of campaigns over the years where
we believed that the mediums, strap-line, or creative messages were appealing. But that wasn’t
necessarily so.

“For example, newspaper advertising may work for some clubs but not others. Now we can
monitor the number of enquiries that have been made through the local newspaper, and compare
it with the number of sales that have been made against it. We know for sure that this form of
marketing works in some parts of the country but not in others.”

Wakefield says: “With the help of Microsoft technology we have saved Esporta a fortune in
marketing. They have abandoned a whole range of marketing activities because the system
showed they weren’t working.”

Boosting Staff Efficiency and Productivity

Prior to the use of SQL Server, Esporta clubs spent hours phoning around to collect the data about
new members. Wakefield says: "Analysis Services enabled Esporta to exploit the product they
already had. They didn’t want to buy a new system—they wanted to use what was already there.”

Forster says: “Staff members would have the telephone pressed to their ears for several hours. As
we’ve grown rapidly from 30 clubs to 66 clubs, it would potentially take a whole day. Now when
they arrive in the morning, the information is already there. This solution changes the way people
work.”

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Using the solution, Esporta can identify which clubs need to focus more on their marketing.
Moran says: “Immediately we can see if a certain club, which has collected 300 new names and
addresses, still has unqualified leads. I can go and speak to that club with new objectives.
Everyone can see the value in getting it right, all the way down the chain.”

Precision Decision Making

The membership analysis ensures Esporta can better identify its clients and establish patterns in
its membership.

Forster says: “We can look back and see how long someone has been a member. We can estimate
who’s going to leave, who’s going to stay, and for how long. The solution moves us away from
using information that was based on a gut feeling, to something that is now based on fact. We can
make sure that our marketing makes an impact, instead of just hoping that it will.”

Moran says: “We have 260,000 members and we need to understand how they behave. These
systems help us target similar member groups in the future. Looking back and understanding
more about members’ habits, and marketing more cleverly are the best ways to gain value from
our marketing pound.”

Giving Customers the Best Deal

The solution enables Esporta to develop its corporate memberships. It can instantly see how many
members work for the same company. “We can then make good decisions on whether we can
offer that company a better rate,” says Moran. When new companies make enquiries, Esporta can
quickly establish if individual offices have already set up local arrangements and negotiate with
them to either bring them all together or continue as they are.

“We are trying to sell people the chance to change their life—a decision that exists entirely in
their own minds,” says Moran. ” We also understand that new members are often more active at
the beginning and then ease off. At that vital early stage we can inspire them to get back into the
exercise habit, rather than try and recover them when it’s too late. We can help members achieve
their own aims.”

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Flexibility for the Future

Esporta is delighted with the way the Microsoft technology is scalable to grow with the
organization. “One of the reasons for going down the Microsoft route is that we can build on it,”
says Forster. “I don’t have to waste the money I’ve already spent on it just to add new technology
when the time is right.
“We now understand a lot more about what Microsoft Analysis Services and ProClarity are able
to do for us, so we will be more sophisticated a year down the line, and will have a better idea of
what we want to do in the future.”

FUTURE
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OF
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Future of Business Intelligence – Visitionaries Note :

 In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a

near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features
will earn $1 billion per year. -- Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer,
Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.

 Within three years, users will begin demanding near-real-time analysis relating to their
business -- in the same fashion as they monitor stock quotes online today. Monthly and
even daily reports won't be good enough. Business intelligence will be more focused on
vertical industries and feature more predictive modeling instead of ad hoc queries. --
Thomas Chesbrough, executive vice president of Thazar, a Skywire Software company,
Frisco, Texas

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 In the next three years, companies (and their business managers) will become utterly
dependent on real-time business information, in much the same way that people expect to
get information from the Internet in one or two clicks. This instant "Internet experience"
will create the new framework for business intelligence, but business processes will have
to change to accommodate and exploit the real-time flows of business data. -- Nigel
Stokes, CEO, DataMirror Corp., Toronto

 Companies are drowning in terabytes of data. In order to exploit the growing ocean of
data, businesses will focus their business-intelligence spending in the next three years on
technologies that address the inefficiencies of the underlying data storage, rather than the
already powerful analytic applications. -- Foster Hinshaw, chief technology officer,
Netezza Corp., Framingham, Mass.
 In the next two years, business-intelligence capabilities will become more democratized,
with a far greater number of end users across the enterprise using the tools to get better
visibility into the performance of their segment of the business. Think of it as executive
dashboards for worker bees. -- Steve Molsberry, senior consultant, Stonebridge
Technologies Inc., Dallas

 By the end of next year, banks will rely more and more on information gleaned directly
from customers to predict loan defaults and collections. Lenders will use notes from
customer interactions and conversations with collection center agents, as well as e-mail
and other streams of unstructured communication, to significantly improve the prediction
of the customer behavior. Banks currently rely on historical structured transaction data
that's only producing marginal returns. But higher write-off rates and debt delinquencies
will force financial institutions to deploy new methods. -- Gwen Spertell, CEO,
Intelligent Results Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.

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 By improving the targeting of marketing messages, business-intelligence technology may
save more than $200 billion dollars a year in wasted advertising and direct marketing.
Data mining combined with marketing automation changes the fundamental economics
of marketing and will probably increase the efficiency of all marketing expenditures by
as much as 20% by 2007. -- Dave Morgan, CEO, Tacoda Systems Inc., New York

 Business is war! Like in any war, survival depends on being able to act quickly in a
constantly changing environment. Business intelligence will eventually operate as a
business command-and control-center (BCCC). Similar to how a missile command center
constantly performs tracking and analysis and triggers countermeasures, the BCCC will
track variables, such as operational performance, market conditions and competitors'
performance, in real-time. -- Sol Klinger, director, Sterling Management Solutions Inc.,
Princeton, N.J.
 Unstructured customer feedback contains critical indicators for customer attrition, upsell
opportunities and product enhancements. In 2003, companies that fail to utilize their
customers' unstructured feedback will be left in the dust! -- Guy Jones, vice president and
founder of Island Data Corp., Carlsbad, Calif.

 By 2006, half of all data warehouses that exist today will be replaced by a more
streamlined architecture that I will call "data shopping malls." They'll contain sets of data
arranged by use for each business unit that will allow the business-unit managers to
analyze data specific to their area of interest. The data shopping malls will be more
accurate, more responsive and less susceptible to the statistical anomalies of large data
sets in the data warehouse. -- Craig Branning, senior vice president, Tallan Inc.,
Glastonbury, Conn.

 Knowledge workers have tended to analyze data in isolation because the software they
use doesn't let them do anything else. But data analysis must move from solo to
collaborative if we're ever going to eliminate the bottleneck of specialized business
analysts. This means packaging analytical applications into portal interfaces that ordinary

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 people can access online and then allowing them to share not just the static output, but
[also] the actual dynamic analytical experience through online collaboration. We'll see
this happen among early adopters later this year, and it will be mainstream by 2005. --
Andrew Coutts, CEO, Databeacon Inc., Ottawa

 Within two to three years, companies will ditch the traditional model of making business
adjustments on a quarterly basis. Instead, they'll use business intelligence and
performance management tools to make real-time shifts in strategy to respond to changes
in the marketplace. --Rob Ashe, president and chief operating officer, Cognos Inc.,
Burlington, Mass.
 Vendors that promise business intelligence but capture only historical data from company
databases will be tomorrow's memories -- extinct providers who simply couldn't deliver
true real-time intelligence. Real business intelligence means analyzing not only
documents, databases and e-mail, but also other sources of rich and constantly changing
data, such as Web site content, PDF files, Internet-based discussions, call logs and survey
responses. -- Mahendra B. Vora, chairman and CEO, Intelliseek Inc., Cincinnati

 Within five years, terms such as business intelligence and data mining will have all but
disappeared from the corporate lexicon. They'll be replaced by business actions
automatically triggered by systems with "corporate foresight," based on predictive
analytics. And instead of being used by a limited number of technical analysts, these
technologies will be applied at all levels, from the CEO managing corporate risk to the
human resources professional identifying attrition risk among the best employees. --
Colin Shearer, vice president of customer analytics, SPSS Inc., Chicago

 Users will demand more integration between the numbers and the commentary. At some
point, all business-intelligence applications will include content management or
knowledge management tools as well. -- Brian Hartlen, senior vice president, Comshare
Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.

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 In about five years, we'll see a dramatic 40% increase in the number of end users who use
business-intelligence tools. The monolithic data warehouse strategies will be replaced
with technologies that build virtual data access points based on the end user's query
needs. These points will dynamically collect data from a variety of sources including data
mart, data warehouse, production systems and external sources and present a single
personal data view. -- Frank Gelbart, CEO, Appfluent Technology Inc., Arlington, Va.
 In early 2004, some bored geek starts an open-source OLAP [online analytical
processing] initiative. Suddenly, Oracle doesn't think that Linux and its ilk are that cool
anymore. -- Gerald Boyd, director of research, NCS Technologies Inc., Piscataway, N.J.

 In a few years, competitive advantage will come from using business intelligence to
understand customer behavior and preferences at a narrow segmentation level and even
an individual level and then delivering customized, context-sensitive offers. But given the
cost and difficulty of actually doing this, by 2010, at least 50% of the Fortune 500 will
turn to outsourcing contractors that have the next-generation technology and database
marketing expertise to do it. -- Jeff Zabin, vice president, Seurat Co., Boulder, Colo.

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Bibliography:

WEBSITES:
1. www.microstategy.com
2. www.binews.com
3. www.businessintelligence.com
4. www.businessobjects.com
5. www.informationbuilders.com
6. www.intelligententerprise.com
7. www.wipro.com/itservices/datawarehouse

BOOKS:

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