One topic that was not covered in Chapter 6, however, was that of commercially available products that can provide a great deal of the user-side functionality, an alternative to custom-developed solutions. In this chapter, we'll take a brief look at three different vendor approaches to off-the-shelf front-end products:

• Vignette

• Ithena

• Revenio

We selected these three vendors from the hundreds of possibilities (more on that in a moment) as representative of three different paths that vendors are taking toward the area of e-commerce business intelligence and data warehousing. Vignette comes to this discipline by expanding on its initial e-commerce transactional and content management offerings, courtesy of several strategic company acquisitions. Ithena, on the other hand, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Business Objects, a leading data warehousing tool vendor, and was established with the objective of focusing solely on customer intelligence. Finally, Revenio is representative of the no-prior-legacy approach of an entirely new start-up beginning their product development with a clean slate.

Some readers may be wondering about products from their own favorite vendors MicroStrategy, Informatica, Broadvision, E.piphany, or one of hundreds of others that can be categorized into this space. By no means are we endorsing any one of the three vendors' product offerings that we discuss in this chapter, in comparison with each other or with...