Owens & Minor Inc. gave its customers access to data that helped them manage their purchasing budgets, monitor order-fulfillment rates for service-level compliance, and check their eligibility for volume rebates. The service was a hit. Customers paid only a nominal fee to access the 150-Gbyte data warehouse, dubbed Wisdom, via an extranet. And it was a boon to Owens & Minor, helping to bring in more than $60 million worth of new business in the first year. The 120-year-old Richmond, Va., medical-supply distributor is an exemplar for how business-intelligence extranets can give companies a new way to serve their best customers and, in some cases, create revenue streams or even lines of business, says independent analyst Phillip Rus-som in Waltham, Mass. Business-intelligence extranets use query, reporting, and analysis software running on a Web server outside the host company's firewall. Subscribers to an extranet's services access the business-intelligence tools through a Web interface, which retrieves the data or analysis results from a database inside the firewall.
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