Most corporations today are inundated with data - from their own internal operational systems, from their vendors, suppliers and customers, and from other external sources like credit bureaus or industry sales data. The problem with understanding where your company is going is not in the amount of data coming into it. The problem is that this tidal wave of data is not in a form that can easily be digested, comprehended, or even accessed.

In today's BI environment, we now find three forms of BI -strategic, tactical, and operational. Until recently, technology was not available to support a mixed workload - that is, has the ability to do massive analytical queries and short, transaction-like queries in the same environment.

This white paper describes business intelligence and its evolution from strategic to operational.