Companies are drowning in the sea of information they collect about customers, competitors and the global landscape. Much of this data is fragmented, collected from a variety of sources in inconsistent formats and stored away in separate departmental databases. Gathering internal information is challenging enough, but then extracting it from operational systems, structuring it in a separate analytical system and turning it into useful business intelligence is a slow grind for many firms. Add to that the growing desire to mine the web for intelligence on competitors and customers, and the business intelligence (BI) task becomes daunting to say the least.