Briefs

Looking for Intelligence in Ice Cream - Companies have mastered collecting information, but not what to do with it. That's made data-sleuthing 'business intelligence' software one of the few hot areas in tech. By Julie Schlosser. Fortune [to appear in March 17th issue].

"Ben & Jerry's may cultivate a down-home image, but as a unit of $47-billion-a-year Unilever, it depends just as heavily on the stats for its success. And to get those figures, it relies on so-called business intelligence, or BI, software: a plain-vanilla name for programs that crunch huge quantities of data in search of trends, problems, or new business opportunities. ... Large retailers typically now have 80 terabytes' worth of information on their products--equivalent to 16 million digital photos or 320 miles of bookshelf. Sears has around 70 terabytes (70 million megabytes) of data, Kmart more than 90, and Unilever 106 terabytes in North America alone. And still that's relatively puny: At the end of last year, Wal-Mart had 285 terabytes in its data warehouse.

But Wall Street doesn't give out awards for collecting data; what the companies needed was a way to put the information to work. Otherwise, says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Mass., 'it's like having a bank account with millions of dollars in it but no ATM card. If you can't get it out and can't make it work for you, then it is not really useful.'"

Here is the full story from Fortune magazine.