So it will be a mixed picture. These companies look to SAP to reduce the integration complexity for meeting their decision support needs. There is a great deal of confusion in the marketplace about knowledge management. In some cases, knowledge management is equated with business intelligence. Rather than identified, knowledge management should be seen as complementary to business intelligence from a software perspective.
Business intelligence enables end users to access primarily structured data.
Knowledge management software, on the other hand, automates the categorization, contextualization, and personalization of primarily unstructured content. Its goals are to enable the timely delivery of information to those who need it then they need it, to identify where expertise resides in order to enable information sharing, and to mitigate the ill effects of employee attrition by retaining valuable intellectual capital. Over time, business intelligence software will be extended to access unstructured as well as structured content this is already happening in the enterprise information portal segment. In addition, business intelligence software will be extended to track how and by whom information in accessed to enable information sharing and collaboration. Analytic applications are software products directed at end users that enable the review, analysis, and optimization of specific business processes.