Stories about: Owens & Minor

It's not difficult to do, but backing up BI data takes time and effort. Without it, that hard-earned data could float away.

Business intelligence was once the domain of statisticians and corporate analysts. Not anymore. BI capabilities are spreading to virtually all parts of the organization, as companies strive to put critical data into the hands of business users who need it to do their jobs.

It's no secret that in a back room in the typical enterprise, there's a team of analytical wizards running sophisticated queries that mine for gems such as data about the company's best customers -- those top 20 percent of clients that produce 80 percent of the company's profits. These jewels can be a business's most valuable intellectual property, which makes them very valuable to competitors.

Veteran IT leader David R. Guzman wants his management to say, "Ah, got it!" And executives at Office Depot definitely did get it when Guzman and a team of his colleagues, in the first application of a new data warehouse, boosted annual sales by US$117 million.

A virtual turf war is breaking out in the health care industry as emerging dot-com companies, established manufacturers, distributors, and traditional brokers scramble to establish competing Internet marketplaces for buying and selling everything from Band-Aids to MRI machines. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in revenue, savings for hospitals and their IT departments, and a controlling interest in the way health care goods are bought and sold in the future.

A group of five major U.S. medical products distributors announced yesterday that they have agreed to establish a new health care electronic marketplace.

Business Objects SA in San Jose followed its customers' lead this month by offering an extranet version of WebIntelligence. Last year, some customers running the client/server version altered and deployed it on an extranet.