Coty Inc., a cosmetics company based in New York City, for example, plans to purchase BI tools within the next six months to provide reports to business users in 25 countries, said David Berry, senior vice president and CIO at Coty. The reports will provide access to customer information related to sales of its Calvin Klein, Jennifer Lopez and Vera Wang perfume lines and other cosmetic products.

Coty is evaluating enterprise BI tools from Information Builders and Business Objects SA and will eventually standardize on tools from a single vendor to send data about credit, trade promotions and inventory levels to business users who never have had access to BI before, Berry said. Until now, BI has been for the "chosen few" employees like controllers and analysts, he said.

The company is making the move to extend BI to the larger group of users because it is putting in place a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to send and manage the services needed to embed BI in workers' business processes.

In January, Coty began using SOA middleware from Information Builders' subsidiary iWay Software to integrate the myriad of systems it inherited through the US$800 million acquisition of Unilever Cosmetics International, a deal announced last July. "The SOA infrastructure is already there," Berry said. "It is a major piece of work and architecture you don't have to deal with when you go to BI."

Moving BI to front-line workers would have been too expensive without the SOA in place, he said. "You would have to bring in some very specific IT talent to do that," according to Berry. "I don't want to have a bunch of developers writing code."