One of IT Business Edge's latest Knowledge Network partners, Ventana Research, has posted a compilation of notes and excerpts from its benchmark report on business intelligence and search capabilities. The report itself is based on research conducted by Ventana in an effort to explore how companies can combine business intelligence software and search technology to improve their performance management efforts.

The findings include:

• Although industry watchers talk about BI and search enabling more business users to have access to information, only 16 percent of the participants in our research rated this “democratization” the number-one benefit of combining the technologies. Although more organizations are broadening access to their BI tools to operational managers and front-line workers, the priority targets reported by our participants for deployment of search and BI were business analysts (71 percent) and executives (57 percent).
• Regarding search vendors, they found that Microsoft’s products are used most often (by 63 percent), followed by those of the consumer provider Google (48 percent), Oracle, IBM and dedicated providers Open Text and Autonomy. Microsoft also led in use of BI tools (53 percent), followed by Oracle, Business Objects and Cognos. Respondents named a completely different set of technology vendors for text analytics and mining; SAS is used by a third (34 percent) of organizations, while none of the other specialized vendors garnered more than 12 percent.