Introduction

Over the last three years, Microsoft has substantially expanded its product lines for business intelligence (BI), the practice of extracting raw data from operational business applications and databases and summarizing and analyzing the data to help organizations and workers make better business decisions. Ideally, BI solutions help workers make better decisions by relying on hard data from day-to-day business activities rather than supposition or instinct. Typical BI users could include the following:

• A regional manager in a retail sporting goods chain who examines seasonal or demographic sales patterns from customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to plan product promotions or campaigns
• Security personnel at a financial institution who search transaction records for specific credit-card use patterns that are indicative of fraud
• Analysts at a large parts manufacturer/distributor who use historical data from an ERP system and predictive