BI FAQs

Q. What is Business Intelligence and what does it do?

A. Business Intelligence, a complete suite of server, client, and developer applications fully integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, delivers business intelligence on the desktop in an integrated, centrally managed environment. Business Intelligence simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on information, anytime and anywhere. Move from just consuming information to developing deep contextual knowledge about that information. By tying strategy to metrics, organizations can gain competitive advantage by making better decisions faster, at all levels of the organization.

Q. Who is Business Intelligence for?

A. Business Intelligence is for businesses that want to drive intelligent decision-making throughout their organizations and make it easy for everyone in the organization to collaborate, analyze, share, and act on business information from a centrally managed, more secure source. Enterprise grade yet attractively priced, Business Intelligence supports IT professionals, information workers, and developers, and empowers organizations of all sizes.

Q. What if I have a small (fewer than 50-person) company? Can I still use Business Intelligence?

A. Yes. We can provide an excellent business intelligence solution for organizations of all sizes. You can deploy reporting solutions to a small workgroup or department with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. You can also perform queries and analysis using Excel Services — new to the 2007 release of Microsoft Office — through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This combination delivers Web-based query and analysis capabilities to every user in a format that is easy to use and centrally secured and managed.

Q. Will BI work with existing servers and databases?

A. Yes. Our Business Intelligence solution has been designed to interoperate with data that exists in virtually any enterprise data source, such as Oracle, IBM DB2, or Sybase. For example, you can use SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to run reports on data stored in an Oracle database. Also, SQL Server 2005 Integration Services can be used to extract data to or from any OLEDB data source.

Q. How much does Business Intelligence cost?

A. The price of your Business Intelligence deployment depends on which programs you choose to implement and how many people you deploy them to.