Crossmark Inc., a provider of labor and services to consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, has almost completed a project to replace a pure-play BI tool with Reporting Services 2005, said Charlie Orndorff, vice president of infrastructure services at the Plano, Texas-based company.

He declined to name the tool being replaced but said it was too cumbersome for monitoring sales of specific products by stores. When the rollout is complete, Reporting Services will be used by 16,000 employees to pull summary data from a field force automation application running on SQL Server 2005, said Orndorff. The database processes point-of-sale data for 30,000 locations and 60,000 items weekly, he said.

Experian Marketing Services in Costa Mesa, Calif., began using SQL Server 2005 BI tools in production about six months ago for a project called ProspectVue, said Eric Tagliere, vice president of technology development.

Experian is using SQL Server to process large data sets about potential customers for retailers, financial services firms, catalog companies and other businesses to use in marketing campaigns, Tagliere said.

The company has struggled to optimize the SQL Server database to meet its performance demands, he noted. "Microsoft had to make some changes to how their software processes some things to provide us the speed and scalability we need," Tagliere said. Some of the products will ship later this year, while others will be available next year, analysts said.