The Cognos tools are now used by managers and employees in treasury management, market research and corporate data stewardship departments at Cullen/Frost. "We're able to get a fast summary of critical success factors to help determine the gap between business plans and actual performance, with the seamless ability to drill into detail of areas of concern or areas of success," says Barton. The visualization software can easily be linked with other analytical and reporting tools, he says.

At Dunn & Bradstreet in Short Hills, N.J., the corporate global analytics group brought in Advizor Solutions' tool about five months ago for a new executive who had used it elsewhere. The five Advizor users say that it readily connects to Microsoft Excel or Access files, along with other corporate databases, but they wish it could use the data in their SAS BI systems.

But it's all about the graphics for director of data management Jinlai Fu, who's responsible for all of D&B's statistical modeling, performed for clients such as internal marketing or account mangers and for C-level executives. "We needed a good graphical tool to help us in our presentations," says Fu. "In the past, we did graphs either in Microsoft Excel [or] PowerPoint itself." Advizor has cut showtime production by at least 20 percent, he estimates.

Taylor Hawes, Microsoft's controller for global platforms and operations, is a Tableau power user. He says he appreciates the Tableau tool's smooth linkage to the underlying data. In October, he distributed the tool to 15 analysts, including people in the human resources and product groups. "Usually when you're dealing with data graphically, you have to disconnect the underlying numbers. Tableau is cool -- you can cut and paste a chart, actually pasting the numbers that you highlighted in cutting it out of the chart," says Hawes. "Technically, Tableau's ability to render a graphical presentation on the fly is exciting; we don't have anything today at Microsoft that can do that."

Who's using them