McDonald`s credits BI for growth

A McDonald`s top executive told the Microstrategy Fall Symposium that the key to successful business intelligence (BI) is making sure the strategy is designed to deliver value, not merely to collect data for data`s sake, reports Destination CRM.

The company turned to BI for insight about how to improve business strategies, according to Julio Ortiz, senior director of IT business intelligence at McDonald`s, who discussed his company`s use of BI during the keynote address at the conference.

"We needed a way to accurately measure the customer experience," Ortiz said. "We wanted to review everything from top to bottom from an internal perspective."

Demand for BI solutions is set to massively increase over the next few years, with the value of the market expected to double by the end of 2012, says Datamonitor, according to itp.net.

Boosted by the rise of the digital enterprise and the commoditisation of BI functionality, the global BI market, which is currently valued at just under $4 billion in licence revenue, will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.5%, according to a new report by the firm.

"Today, even the most ephemeral activities, like Web-browsing, online finance transactions, smart-card activities or B2C interactions, generate an enormous volume of digital transactions that could be stored, queried and analysed," said Vuk Trifkovic, author of the study.

Oracle has taken a first stab at integrating the BI software technology it picked up from Hyperion Solutions using the hot-pluggable model followed by Oracle`s Fusion middleware platform, reports CBR.

Oracle closed its $3.3 billion acquisition of California-based Hyperion in June this year to advance its BI and business performance management strategy.

Oracle this week said it had reached the first "key integration milestone" for BI, which is part of a roadmap for its Oracle enterprise performance management system going forwards.