Dave Novak, senior vice president of sales and business development for SPS Commerce, can tell you about the importance of listening to your customers.

According to Tech Target, SPS offers a Web-based set of intelligence services that helps retailers and suppliers run their supply chains more efficiently. With 1,200 retailers and some 37,000 customers tied together in its ecosystem, SPS had an "immense amount of data" flowing through its data centers, including such things as invoices, purchase orders and packing and labeling information, according to Novak.

"We knew our data centers were loaded with all this rich and valuable content. But we also knew that customers wanted to know more about the data we were processing for them," Novak said.

"For instance, a customer selling to Target might want to know how their fulfillment rates are doing or which products are moving faster to consumers and which ones are in danger of being overstocked."

Listening to what his customers really wanted and knowing that he already had those underutilized goods in hand, Novak realized he was sitting on a new business opportunity. But to take advantage of it, he needed one more element.

"All we needed was a reliable business intelligence platform that could deliver this data to our customers as well as augment our own operational applications," he said.

Novak and his team began their quest to find that supply chain business intelligence platform -- one that would be Web-based so as to fit with their SaaS business model. One thing they quickly discovered was the paucity of Web-based offerings to choose from.

"First and foremost, we needed something that was 100% Internet-based," Novak said. "I didn't want to deal with any client-server stuff, integrating all these different UIs, security and metadata layers. When you really research it, there are not many out there."

Ultimately, SPS chose Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform. An important reason for choosing the product was its multi-tenant capabilities, which the company believed could adequately handle the large number of customers it had on the supply side.