Dr. G: The biggest problem with BI today is the definition of what BI is. We think of it as a lot of modeling, forecasting, and being able to predict customer behavior, such as which customers are going to leave you, or who you should include in a marketing campaign. Business Objects and Cognos have defined BI as querying and reporting. They came up with some very easy-to-use query-and-reporting tools and they're listed as BI vendors. That's strange. They are simply putting queries into a database and displaying the results. I don't see the ìintelligence" in that. Yet they are known as BI vendors.

RM: Is BI essential for businesses in the 21st century?

Dr. G: The question is how far up the food chain do you take BI? Is doing anti-money laundering, trying to find the crux of who you are doing business with, is that BI? Is doing optimization on pricing for a retail store BI? BI is all of the above.

RM: What's the hardest part about leading the global BI conversation?

Dr. G: A lot of companies that have used products (from other companies) are in fact not getting the return on investment they expected. Then we have to tell them: "You didn't buy BI, you bought a query-and-reporting tool." The nice thing we did with our query-and-reporting tool is that enterprises can store processes that invoke all of the powerful analytical capabilities of SAS and yet make those available to the end-user that are using the BI tools. This is what distinguishes us from the other BI vendors.

RM: How do you think the marketing of BI will evolve?

Dr. G: There is no telling how names will evolve. I think one the most interesting phrases that was sold in multi-million dollar increments was "business process re-engineering." I've heard the term so many times in the last 15 years. CEOs said they were going to re-engineer their business, using tools like SAP and Oracle.

What does BPR really mean? It means this dumb software only works one way and you are going to have to change the way you do business to use it. They used the fact that the software was so inflexible to go out and convince managers that needed to re-engineer their entire business. I think CRM is another hijacked term. For us, CRM is about understanding your customers better in terms of forecasting what they might buy.

There are so many buzzwords that get invented and people latch on to as the latest trend on software. "Executive information systems" are no longer in vogue. These are things that put all the facts about your company at your fingertips on the dashboard. Now it is called business performance management or balanced scorecard.

We are working with several large retailers on size optimization so that when you go into a store they are more than likely going to have the size that you want. Instead of sending the standard package of two smalls, two mediums, and two larges to every store in the company they are going to send exactly the right number, because we are simply going in and spending a lot of time clustering the stores that have in the past sold more large and more mediums.

What that means for the customer is that we are using our predictive capability to make sure the size that you want is going to be in the store. What that means for the retailer is that they are not going to have to put so much stuff on sale because nobody bought it because nobody that size was around to buy it at the regular price. So it is a win/win.

RM: What kind of technology delivers this level of business granularity?

Dr. G: Only analytics can deliver it. In the past companies put things on sale to drive traffic. They didn't have any analytic method to determine what price to put on something that is on sale. They knew they were going to reduce the price, but they didn't know how much to reduce the price so it would be more likely to sell and at the same time maximize the profit. This is an enormous computational problem that nobody can do in their head.