"What customers see is analysis and reports, and what we see is the data warehouse," said Nick Besbeas, executive vice president at Digimine, in Kirkland, Wash., an ASP that hosts data warehousing and mining.
Indeed, Allrecipes.com, a Seattle-based Internet community centered on providing free recipes to site visitors, sends Digimine 1GB of log files every night at midnight. The next morning the analytics are waiting for Allrecipes.com's employees.
Before using the service, Allrecipes.com ran the analysis itself, burdening two Intel Pentium II-based servers for 24 hours on end to search the logs.
Mining that data resulted only in a representation of the total number of page views, a notation of the most popular page of the day, and a listing of the top 25 pages viewed that day.
Now the company receives almost anything that can be calculated from Internet logs, according to Scott Carreico, IT manager at Allrecipes.com.
"We've got a marketing department just dying for statistics, and they are always thinking of new reports that they want," he added.
The hosted BI concept is still young. An IDC survey shows that fewer than 5 percent of respondents said they currently use an ASP for hosting data warehouses or mining tools.
