Whats driving business intelligence projects these days: better financial reporting or customer relationship management (CRM)?
From our point of view, it’s financial reporting. But we’d expand that to a concept called business performance management, which goes beyond just reporting. My experience is that when companies are being hit by external political and economic forces — and companies aren’t making money hand over fist — the attention tends to be focused on how to run the business better. You haven’t seen a lot of new CRM initiatives recently; it had its heyday 12 to 18 months ago. We hear a lot about real-time business intelligence. How much of that is hype and how much is reality? There’s certainly hype associated with it. There’s also multiple definitions of the term real time. Most of the real-time technology work in the last few years has been about handling massive amounts of transaction data and looking for anomalies or things that break particular rules. That’s really real time. Applications such as fraud detection, call centers, stock prices. Hyperion has tried to give those transaction alerts
