Users look to offer BI access to customers, partners

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- "Business intelligence for the masses" has been an industry buzzphrase for the past several years. But several users at Information Builders Inc.’s Summit 2006 user conference here said yesterday that they are embracing the philosophy with new projects to quickly move BI reports and analysis out to front-line workers, suppliers and customers.

For example, Coty Inc. plans to purchase BI tools within the next six months to provide reports to business users in 25 countries, said David Berry, senior vice president and CIO at the New York-based cosmetics company. The reports will provide access to customer information related to sales of Coty's Calvin Klein, Jennifer Lopez and Vera Wang perfume lines and other cosmetic products.

The company is evaluating enterprise BI tools from Information Builders and Business Objects SA and will eventually standardize on tools from a single vendor to send data about credit, trade promotions and inventory levels to business users who never have had access to BI before, Berry said. Until now, BI has been for the “chosen few” employees such as controllers and analysts, he said.

Coty is extending BI to the larger group of users because it is putting in place a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to send and manage the services needed to embed BI in workers’ business processes.

In January, Coty began using SOA middleware from Information Builders subsidiary iWay Software Inc. to integrate the myriad of systems it inherited through the $800 million acquisition of Unilever Cosmetics International, a deal announced last July. “The SOA infrastructure is already there,” Berry said. “It is a major piece of work and architecture you don’t have to deal with when you go to BI.”

Moving BI to front-line workers would have been too expensive without the SOA, he said. “You would have to bring in some very specific IT talent to do that,” according to Berry. “I don’t want to have a bunch of developers writing code.”

For its part, Information Builders announced yesterday that it has integrated its WebFocus BI tool set with iWay’s SOA Middleware to allow users to embed analytics in business processes. Linking the two will allow a user to get alerts when an order comes in that exceeds warehouse space, according to Information Builders executives. The company also touted its Active Reports tool -- which was announced in November and began shipping April 10 -- as a tool to expand BI access to new users. The tool embeds an analytic engine in the HTML of a report in an e-mail to allow disconnected users to drill down into the report as if they were connected to a BI report server.