It will launch its BI software in the latest simplified Chinese version in December.

The alliance signals that BO, which has 30 per cent of the global BI market, is striving to tap the Chinese market with its partners.

BO held a press conference last week to illustrate the benefits generated by BI, a newly-introduced software even unfamiliar to some 200 Shanghai managers and CEOs present at the conference.

NatWest Bank in Malaysia is one of the successful cases. NatWest Bank established a data warehouse with BO software, and the company was able to snuff out a $450 million fraud in the bank paper of overseas branches.

This indicated BI software's ability to detect abnormal operations.

During the period when the Asian economic crisis struck Malaysia, Chase Manhattan was the only one to submit information about the bank in 24 hours, on the local government's request of all the banks there.

This showed that BI software enabled its users to react quickly to turbulence.

Owens & Minor, a Fortune 500 company that distributes medical and surgical supplies, applied Web intelligence-based software offered by BO for three months.

It won over $60 million of new business by offering a diversified service.

Many local managers and CEOs were skeptical about the realistic practices and asked: what is business intelligence software exactly?

Sian Pang, general manager of BO Greater China, explained in plain words.

Business intelligence, he said, is the capability to leverage data into meaningful information, providing CEOs with richer insights into business today and allowing them to sense where it may be going tomorrow.

"BI software enables CEOs to understand customer behaviour, analyze sales, identify opportunities for revenue and cost savings, and improve overall decision-making," she said. "It can analyse large amounts of historical data to identify patterns and understand trends that may impact on the companies."

Furthermore, such software could be suitable to traditional manufacturing companies in view of the fact that the management notion gap between such kinds of companies and business intelligence cannot be bridged easily.

Samuel Ji, general manager of Shanghai Baosight Software Co, organized on the base of Baosteel Group's three former IT subsidiaries, cited his companies' daily practice.

"Over 100 employees of our company have spent three years developing the Baosteel Integrated Production and Sales Information Management System, the first Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system in the domestic steel industry, which contributes a lot to the 100 million yuan (US$12 million) profit in 2000," he said.

Ji added that the benefit of employing new and high technology had given Baosight the confidence to use Bo's software to improve Baosteel's ERP system.

Baosight plans to help Bo promote BI software to large-scale steel-manufacturing enterprises. "Baosteel's success is very convincing to these enterprises," Ji said.

Some CEOs worried that promotion of the ERP system is encountering difficulties, and therefore BI software's development here will be blocked.

Sian Pang said: "The current ERP system still takes time. BI software's functions, such as data access, data mining and data analysis, will provide different ERP systems with seamless integration, making the systems more powerful. So it's a bright time to enter the Chinese market."

Pang said the reason for the strategic alliance is to educate the overall market and promote the software more forcefully through multiple distribution channels.

These channels are offered by the six partners in different industries like Baosight in steel manufacturing, Capital Network in telecommunications, and Ernst & Young in finance and consulting.

As a company with a government background, Capital Network has the right to establish IT infrastructure like broadband connection and enjoy many corporate consumers.

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