After years of gorging on IT, CEOs and boards of directors have indigestion. They're demanding greater returns from their existing systems before buying more. One way to deliver that return is through data analysis and data mining tools, which become even more important as every dollar earned -- or saved -- becomes more crucial.

Analytics "makes the difference between an average implementation of e-business or [customer relationship management] and an excellent implementation," says Frank Buytendijk, a senior research analyst at Gartner Inc. in the Netherlands. "It's in analytics where you assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what you're doing."

Buytendijk predicts that the demand for skilled analysts will triple between 2000 and 2004 and that by then, companies will be able to find only half the skilled analysts they need. Given that shortage, Framingham, Mass.-based market researcher IDC predicts that the market for analytic software will grow almost 28 percent between 1999 and 2004 to more than US$6.6 billion.

From semiconductors to pharmaceuticals, companies will be seeking and using new tools with which to better understand their businesses and even to streamline the analytic process itself.

Giving Users the Data They Need

At International Rectifier Corp., an El Segundo, Calif.-based producer of power management semiconductors, manager of financial analytics Doug Burke says Hyperion Solutions Corp.'s Essbase 5.1 has allowed the company to "get a lot more out of our AS/400" midrange system by allowing the company to extract and analyze sales data very inexpensively. Rather than being forced to e-mail huge spreadsheets, which ties up network bandwidth, users can now retrieve dynamically calculated views of just the data they need, he says.

Burke says he expects more cost savings this summer when he deploys Version 6.1, which includes attributes that will allow users to dynamically analyze data across additional dimensions (such as sales area) without having to store those calculations and thus increase the size of the database. "That's a big payoff," he says, "especially when you want to scale this thing up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of products" to analyze.

When catalog retailer Blair Corp. relaunched its Web site in December, "we were looking from Day 1 how to be more profitable," says Jeff Parnell, vice president and general manager of e-commerce. The relaunch not only added many more products to the site but was also the first iteration of the site to be promoted in the millions of catalogs the firm mails each year.

The Warren, Pa.-based company wanted a Web clickstream analysis tool to tell it which areas within the site attracted the most customers and exactly why those browsing did or didn't buy, says Darren Schott, the company's director of marketing for e-commerce.

For the answers, Blair turned to IntelliVisor, an online analytic service offered by SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, N.C., to determine such things as which product categories suffered the most cart abandonment (customers ending their shopping process without completing the order) and which generated the highest conversion rates (turning browsers into buyers.) The application service provider model was attractive, Schott

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