E.INTELLIGENCE ANNOUNCES SUITE 3.5 FOR PREDICTIVE INTELLIGENCE.

e.Intelligence, Inc., a provider of Predictive Intelligence software, has launched e.Intelligence Suite 3.5 with three new enterprise-wide demand planning solutions -- Pricing and Promotion, New Item Introduction and Distribution and Assortment; a net-native architecture; and enhanced performance functionality.

The e.Intelligence Suite delivers Predictive Intelligence, the next-generation of business intelligence, by leveraging an organization's data warehouse as a central information hub to run "What if" analysis in order to better predict future demand. The new solutions integrate business processes with the e.Intelligence Suite to provide users with a common demand planning process for the entire organization enabling unprecedented visibility to improve demand accuracy, which ultimately drives financial and operational performance. The net-native architecture and performance enhancements make it easier and faster for organizations to share secure views of demand forecasts with other organizations such as business partners, suppliers and customers.

Historically, demand has been managed department by department through a collection of silo'd spreadsheets that are unable to provide detailed product and customer demand visibility, are not integrated into any business process, do not provide common business rules and cannot provide organization-wide visibility. Organizations today need real-time insight into demand shifts and the ability to see and understand the impact of all demand drivers across the enterprise, so they can better manage product planning, pricing, promotion, merchandising, replenishment, and other activities that influence demand and their bottom line.

"Everyday, we read about organizations missing their financial targets because of a lack of demand visibility," said Rick Tanler, chief executive officer and president at e.Intelligence. "Organizations have to change their demand planning process and leverage the data that already exists in their data warehouse. With our years of experience in data warehousing and business intelligence, we realized that in order for organizations to accurately predict demand, they required a solution that provides granularity of detail, scales to handle multi-terabyte databases and enables real-time updates to demand plans -- thus the data warehouse is the most logical foundation to establish a common demand planning process."

The e.Intelligence Suite leverages the data warehouse's common business rules, hierarchies and metrics to accurately measure and manage multi-billion dollar demand on a real-time basis at the individual product and customer level. e.Intelligence Suite provides unprecedented demand visibility across divisions and departments as well as from a summary level (all products) down to the most detailed levels (individual product brands, by customer and/or by region) -- all in the same consolidated view. In addition, users can perform "What if" analysis to determine the impact of demand changes on margins, product mix and price. The combination of enterprise-wide demand visibility, "What if" scenarios and ability to monitor plan versus actual performance in real-time enables organizations to swiftly manage operations in order to maximize profitability. Since updated plans are added back to the data warehouse, new data is fed to other operational systems such as CRM, ERP and SCM, to improve their efficiencies. In addition, business intelligence tools can enhance their reports and provide plan versus actual performance on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.

Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute, segments Business Intelligence applications into three categories: "What was" knowledge, "What is" reporting and most recently "What if" analysis. "Most business analytical tools to date have focused on trying to make sense of events that occurred in the past. A key element of next-generation business intelligence is to use past events to predict the future. The e.Intelligence Suite is an exciting new product because it focuses on providing predictive intelligence, complementing a company's existing suite of business analytics tools," said Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute.

"e.Intelligence addresses the need for collaborative demand planning with a unique combination of extensive data warehousing-based application experience, predictive modeling technology, and vertical expertise," said Henry Morris, vice president of applications and information access at IDC. "The imperative to optimize the management and delivery of products and services creates a need for the type of applications featured in the e.Intelligence Suite. The highly verticalized operations/production analytic applications segment should grow to a $2.4B market by 2005."