Vendors Harness Excel (and Office) to Win the Lower-end of Business Intelligence Market
P.J. Jakovljevic - June 22, 2005

Excel Both Opportunity and Threat

The need for business intelligence (BI) is of real and increasing strategic importance for all enterprise applications users because of economic and regulatory pressures. Unfortunately, users rarely feel that they get all (or most) the information they need from their enterprise software systems. Business intelligence is also known as analytics, though there are some distinctions between the two. BI is a broader set of technologies and means, whereas analytics refers to specialized software that analyzes data about a particular functional area, like marketing, sales, real estates, etc. Both have been inseparable from enterprise resource planning (ERP) ever since the idea of business automation via information technology (IT) way back in the 1960s. However, ERP, and BI and analytics have had different user experiences, evolutionary paths...