Business Intelligence Within Reach.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Power of Business Intelligence .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Changing Face of Business Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Microsoft Solutions for Business Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Extend Your Solution Through Partners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Resource CD Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Table of Contents
Built on affordable programs and
technologies, Microsoft Business Intelligence
solutions eliminate many of the barriers
to entry, including the often prohibitively
high initial investment costs and the
steep expenses associated with ongoing
administration and maintenance. Combining
industry-leading ease of use and the
ability to integrate easily and quickly with
a broad range of desktop productivity
programs, intranet applications, and business
applications, solutions built on the Microsoft
Business Intelligence technologies deliver
essential business insights to a wide base of
users, empowering employees to make fast,
highly-informed business decisions as part
of their daily routines. Whether your goal is
to take better advantage of systems already
in place, or implement a new generation
of technologies and applications that can
enhance your company’s competitiveness,
Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions
provide everything your company needs
to track and analyze every aspect of your
business.
This document introduces Microsoft Business
Intelligence solutions, and demonstrates how
solutions that provide business insights to
all levels of the organization deliver a higher
return on their investment and increased
competitive advantage through faster, more
informed decision making.
Today’s organizations have the ability
to gather and store once-unimaginable
volumes of operational data and customer
information. The challenge is utilizing all of
that information to drive better decision
making. The answer lies with “business
intelligence.” Business intelligence provides
organizations with a framework for sorting
through the daily flood of data in order to
extract insights that can provide a critical
edge in today’s highly competitive economy.
Business intelligence tools deliver a deeper
understanding of customer and partner
relationships, as well as key performance
indicators. By translating this understanding
into action, companies can derive significant
benefits in the form of increased profits, an
improved ability to take advantage of new
opportunities, and the ability to respond
more quickly to changing market demands.
Business intelligence is not new. But until
now, the high cost of the specialized
software, skills, and infrastructure required
to build, maintain, and operate business
intelligence systems has meant that only the
largest companies have had the resources
required to implement business intelligence
solutions. Today, a new generation of
solutions built on Microsoft Business
Intelligence solutions has put the power
of business intelligence within reach of
organizations of every size.
Business Intelligence Within Reach
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In today’s challenging business climate, companies of all sizes, in virtually every industry,
struggle with a similar set of questions:
How can we increase revenue?
Who are our most profitable customers, and how can we serve them better?
Where are we spending money and seeing the best returns?
Business intelligence provides a powerful way to find the best answers to each of these
questions.
The Power of Business Intelligence
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Increased business agility.
Combining more accurate prediction
mechanisms and analysis and reporting
capabilities with real-time transactional
feedback and implementation tools,
business intelligence gives your
organization the capability to move
from an idea to an action almost
instantly. The result is the ability to
respond to new opportunities with
unprecedented speed.
Lowered operating costs. Business
intelligence reduces the amount
of time required to collect relevant
business information and then
empowers employees at all levels to
conduct queries, prepare reports, and
implement the results—with little or no
support from database administrators
and IT specialists.
Benefits of Business IntelligenceEmployees are expected to do much more
analysis in their jobs today than in the past,
in a far shorter period of time, and with
far fewer resources. Meanwhile, the ability
to make and implement accurate business
decisions at lightning fast speeds has
become a critical requirement for today’s
successful businesses.
In the face of these challenges, does your
company need business intelligence?
Business analysts and experts who track the
fast-changing information technology world
are nearly unanimous in their belief that
you almost certainly do. “Ignorance is the
greatest threat to modern business,” reads a
recent Gartner Research article.
By providing insights about your
organization’s important business
information, business intelligence helps
you make decisions with greater speed
and increased confidence. In most cases,
the tangible results can be seen almost
immediately.
CRM
HR
Manufacturing
ERP
Financial
Extending business intelligence to allow users to interact directly with data stored in your ERP, ERM, CRM, point-of-sale, order entry, inventory management, payroll, and other systems allows you to get more out of your investment in database and data management technology.
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Business intelligence positions your
company to generate the most value from
existing lines of business and anticipate
new opportunities. Business intelligence
solutions can help your company shorten
product development cycles, streamline
operations, fine tune marketing campaigns,
and improve relationships with customers
and suppliers, all of which means lower costs
and improved profit margins.
Streamlined customer acquisition.
Business intelligence enables
marketers to accurately identify
potential customers and to present
effective, focused campaigns that can
dramatically reduce the per-customer
costs of marketing and advertising.
Increased customer loyalty.
By providing a clear picture of
customer needs, business intelligence
makes it easier to determine which
products, features, and services your
customers value. Business intelligence
also provides powerful tools for
delivering personalized communication
and one-to-one marketing over the
Internet. The bottom line: greater
profitability.
By providing a clear picture of customer needs, business intelligence makes it easier to determine which products, features, and services your customers value.
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The Company-Wide Impact of Business IntelligenceNo matter how big your business is, business
intelligence solutions can have far-reaching
effects. With Business intelligence solutions
in place, every operational group will have
access to the information it needs to fine-
tune day-to-day decision making:
Finance. By providing financial
planners with immediate access to real-
time data, business intelligence builds
value into all financial operations,
including budgeting and forecasting.
Operations. From quality control to
inventory management to production
planning, business intelligence provides
a mechanism for analyzing the
performance of any operational process.
Sales and marketing. Business
intelligence offers powerful tools
for understanding customer needs
and responding to new market
opportunities. Marketing analysts
can gauge the effects of pricing and
promotions, target customer segments
more accurately, analyze buying
patterns to take advantage of cross-sell
opportunities, and develop real-time
one-to-one marketing.
Human resources. From skills
assessment to managing the
performance of individuals or groups,
business intelligence supports the
recruitment, retention, and career
development of key employees.
Product development. Business
intelligence gives product development
teams access to critical customer and
market data, along with the crucial
supplier information needed to
conduct accurate cost-benefit analyses
about features and materials.
Customer service. Business
intelligence tools provide a way to
accurately assess the value of market
segments and individual customers,
and help businesses retain the
customers who deliver the most profit.
Supplier relations. Business
intelligence takes advantage of online
supplier and partner integration
to provide new levels of supplier
performance analysis, new design
collaboration opportunities, and more.
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Yesterday’s business intelligence solutions required mainframe query and reporting tools
to deliver product and market analysis. In that era, implementing a business intelligence
application was extremely costly, and the tools needed to extract insight from data were
complex, which meant that only a small number of highly trained specialists had the skills
needed to access and query information.
Generating reports from these systems took a long time, and queries had to be run in
batches. This created delays between the time information was requested and the time a
report could be delivered, and it often meant that reports were created based on data that
was already out of date. In addition, reports generated by these early business intelligence
systems were static—to drill down to find additional information on a particular data point
meant submitting another query request.
Today, a new generation of business intelligence solutions—powered by technological
advances—overcomes these limitations, transcending slow, static reporting to
deliver powerful, interactive analytical capabilities in near real-time. Today’s business
intelligence solutions can give organizations a competitive advantage by allowing them
to unlock the power of data; quickly discern trends, patterns, and relationships that
represent important new opportunities; and then use that intelligence to alter course
in hours and minutes, rather than weeks or months.
The Changing Face of Business Intelligence
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As a result, business intelligence is rapidly
becoming a mission-critical application that
is essential to success. Critical changes that
are driving this transformation include:
Improved interactivity and ease
of use. Today’s business intelligence
solutions give you direct access to
critical business information, along
with the ability to conduct your
own queries and analysis without
assistance from IT or information
specialists. New forms of graphical data
representation and simpler reporting
tools empower employees to quickly
make better business decisions. With
today’s business intelligence solutions,
employees can also easily collaborate
on analyses, share insight, and act upon
the knowledge they gain.
Cost-effective technology. As the
cost of technology has decreased, so
have many of the barriers to entry for
implementing sophisticated business
intelligence applications. Today’s
solutions leverage existing applications
and IT infrastructure to dramatically
reduce the initial investment and
administrative costs associated with
these systems. Built on familiar desktop
applications, they also minimize the
cost of training.
Integration. Today’s business
intelligence systems deliver the means
to integrate real-time transactional
data into decision-making processes
at both the strategic and tactical levels.
Tight integration with a broad range
of desktop productivity and intranet
applications expands the reach of
business intelligence solutions to
significantly more employees within an
organization. The ability to incorporate
live data into planning models can
dramatically improve the value of
medium- and long-term planning, and
allows managers to evaluate trends
with greater speed and accuracy.
Intuitive graphical data representation capabilities and simpler reporting tools empower users to quickly make better decisions.
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To overcome the limitations of business
intelligence systems built on expensive,
complex technologies, Microsoft has
developed a comprehensive set of solutions
that will enable employees at every level of
your company to access data from a wide
range of sources and quickly discern trends,
patterns, and relationships that represent
important new opportunities. Based on
easy-to-use analysis tools, applications, and
reporting capabilities, this new generation
of solutions from Microsoft delivers the
benefits of business intelligence—
including greater speed and quality in
decision-making processes, lowered
costs, and improved competitiveness—
to companies of all sizes.
Programs and technologies that make
up Microsoft Business Intelligence
offerings include Microsoft Office
System, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000,
and Microsoft Business Solutions.
Microsoft Solutions for Business Intelligence
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The Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions
Microsoft Business Intelligence provides flexible, end-to-end solutions you can use to turn
information into action.
Data Analysis & ReportingIdentify the patterns and trends within large volumes of data.
VisualizationView your data graphically to help you make better business decisions.
Business Intelligence Collaboration PortalCapitalize on the collective insight and experience of your employees.
Analytical ApplicationsBuild a customizable business intelligence solutions from your operational data.
Manage Key Performance MetricsManage key performance goals, as defined by analyzed data.
Office 2003Give knowledge workers the tools they need to access, analyze, and create critical business data.
SQL Server 2000Build scalable, powerful data-warehousing and data-mining solutions.
Microsoft Business SolutionsIntegrate financial and operational data from across your company.
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Familiar to millions of people around the
world, Microsoft® Office System provides
a sophisticated set of tools, applications,
solutions, and technologies for accessing,
analyzing, visualizing and reporting
data from virtually any source. The tight
integration of products and technologies
enables the Microsoft Office System to
deliver a rich set of applications that offer:
Improved employee and organizational
productivity through timely, accurate
business decision making based on
powerful analytical, collaboration,
and visualization tools.
Reduced complexity in managing
business metrics and in creating
flexible, sophisticated reports
using tools and solutions that are
easy to use, simple to deploy,
and that take advantage of
existing IT investments.
Comprehensive, reliable, and
secure Business Intelligence
solutions that integrate easily
with existing business systems,
devices, and processes.
Microsoft Office System
To realize the maximum benefit from any
business intelligence solutions, it is essential
that the front-end tools used for information
access, analysis, and reporting are easy to
understand and easy to use.
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Powerful Analysis Tools: Excel
A key component of Microsoft Business
Intelligence solutions, Microsoft Office Excel
2003 helps employees access, process, analyze,
share, and display the information they need
to understand real-time business conditions.
A powerful calculation engine, combined
with charting and query features, provides
employees at every level with analytical
capabilities that were once the exclusive
domain of finance or analysis departments.
Microsoft Excel helps employees access, process, analyze, share, and display the information they need to understand real-time business conditions.
With Excel, you can take advantage of
interactive, multidimensional views to
quickly combine and compare large
amounts of data, rotate rows and columns
to see different summaries of the source
data, and display details for areas of interest.
Using Office Web Components, Excel
reports can easily be added to custom
applications and portals.
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Improved Metrics Management and
Flexible Reporting: Office Business
Intelligence Solutions Accelerators
Office Business Intelligence Solutions
Accelerators will enable your company to
take advantage of the business intelligence
capabilities in the Microsoft Office System to
quickly address critical business needs.
The Microsoft Office Solutions
Accelerator for Business Scorecards:
Business Scorecards is a Web-based
business intelligence offering that
enables you to easily visualize and
communicate business strategies,
drill down into key business data,
and simplify the measurement of
key performance metrics, resulting
in faster decision making, increased
corporate accountability and
improved business performance.
The Microsoft Office Solutions
Accelerator for Excel OLAP Reporting:
Excel OLAP Reporting is a business
intelligence offering that enables you
to gain critical business insights by
utilizing Microsoft Excel to create
flexible, sophisticated reports with
greater speed and accuracy than ever
before; access relevant information
from multiple sources; perform in-
depth analyses; and improve vital
business activities such as business
planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
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Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing:
SharePoint Portal Server
The ability to tap into the collective
knowledge and experience of your
employees is critical to creating a more
agile, better-informed organization that is
quicker at solving problems and replicating
victories. To extend this capability to business
intelligence solutions, Microsoft offers
powerful features that allow employees to
easily collaborate on analysis and share the
resulting intelligence with their peers.
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server will enable your organization to tie together business data from across different systems into a searchable portal.
Microsoft Office SharePoint™ Portal Server
will enable your organization to tie together
business data from across different systems
into a searchable portal. The result is
improved access, both to key information
and the tools needed to organize and share
knowledge efficiently. This architecture
provides teams with a common view of key
performance indicators and other business
metrics, and it enables them to easily publish
business intelligence from Office 2003, so that
other employees can take advantage of it.
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The Benefits of Visualization: Visio,
MapPoint, and Data Analyzer
The ability to visually present complex or
abstract business data is a powerful way
to help employees draw insights, make
comparisons, and spot trends or anomalies.
The flexibility to represent data as charts,
tables, and maps will enhance the value
and extend the reach of your business
intelligence solutions.
The ability to visually present complex or abstract business data is a powerful way to help employees draw insights, make comparisons, and spot trends or anomalies.
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Several Office 2003 applications combine
powerful analysis features with intuitive
visualization features that make it easy to
deliver graphical representations of your data.
Microsoft Office Visio® 2003 drawing
and diagramming software enables
you to create business and technical
diagrams that allow you to visualize
and communicate information clearly,
concisely, and effectively in ways that
text and numbers cannot.
Data Analyzer displays the
relationships among unlimited business
dimensions in customizable views
that help you easily identify trends,
opportunities, and potential problems.
Combine business data with geographic and demographic information.
With MapPoint® business mapping
software, you can combine business
data with geographic and demographic
information, and visually plot trends
such as customer distribution, regional
sales performance, and the competitive
landscape against maps of your
markets and territories.
Data Analyzer displays the relationships between unlimited business dimensions in customizable views that help users easily identify trends, opportunities, and potential problems.
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Flexible and Complete: SQL Server 2000
with Analysis Services
Today’s dynamic business conditions
demand a complete, flexible solution that
will enable your company to respond more
quickly. SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services
provides Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
capabilities that deliver fast analysis, along
with graphical administration interfaces to
easily chart and monitor information.
Analysis Services works with data stored
in SQL Server 2000 or virtually any other
data source, and it integrates with a
broad range of client applications,
including Microsoft Office, browser-
based applications, and mobile devices
via an intranet, the Internet, or even
while offline. SQL Server 2000 Analysis
Services provides fast access to business
data by creating multidimensional
cubes from information in a data
warehouse. Together with SQL
Server 2000, Analysis Services offers
everything needed to build analysis
applications, and it lowers the total
cost of ownership for business
intelligence solutions by simplifying
the processes required to build and
maintain cubes.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000As decision-making responsibilities move
out of executive offices and into the hands
of mid-level managers and line workers,
the challenge is to provide a focused and
accurate view of the right business data to
the right people at the right time, and then
give them the tools they need to understand
the data and use it to drive intelligent
decisions. By combining the rich, robust data
management capabilities of SQL Server 2000
with the familiar tools found in Office 2003,
Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions
make enterprise-class analysis and reporting
functionality available to the widest possible
range of employees.
At the heart of the Microsoft business
intelligence vision is SQL Server 2000.
A complete database and data analysis
package, SQL Server 2000 opens the door to
a new generation of business applications.
Fully Web-enabled, SQL Server 2000
provides core support for XML and delivers
the ability to query across the Internet, and
even beyond the firewall. Integrated with
Analysis Services and Reporting Services, SQL
Server 2000 includes the functionality and
data mining services needed to provide a
complete solution for analysis and reporting.
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Beyond Analysis: SQL Server 2000
Reporting Services
Understanding business information is just a
starting point. Faster, more accurate decision
making also requires tools that enable
employees to share the insights gained from
business intelligence solutions. SQL Server
2000 Reporting Services is a comprehensive
solution for creating, managing, and
delivering real-time reports—in both
traditional paper formats and as interactive
Web-based reports. A complement to
the business intelligence capabilities of
SQL Server, Reporting Services enhances
business decision making with rich reporting
functionality that makes it easy to deliver
in-depth information to the right people in
virtually any business environment.
With SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services,
your company will have a complete set of
tools for creating reports and deploying
custom reporting solutions to individual
employees across your company. SQL Server
2000 Reporting Services supports the entire
reporting life cycle:
Report authoring. Build custom
applications that take advantage of the
Microsoft .NET Framework to connect
to custom data sources, output to
multiple formats, and deliver to a wide
range of devices.
Report management. Publish and
manage report definitions, folders, and
resources as Web services that can be
executed either on-demand or on a
specified schedule.
Report delivery. Provide reports to
employees on-demand (pull) and
through event-based (push) delivery via
e-mail, a corporate portal, in a Microsoft
Office System program, or embedded
within a line-of-business application.
Closed-Loop Analysis With OLAP Actions
The ultimate in business agility—and the
greatest return on investment—comes when
your company can turn business intelligence
into action. OLAP Actions, a feature of Analysis
Services, takes analysis one step further,
allowing employees to take the next steps in
the business process, and trigger the action
with a single click. OLAP Actions enables you
to link analytical tasks with business processes
to shorten the decision cycle and create an
automated, finely-tuned feedback loop that
can help your business respond with once-
unimaginable speed and accuracy to fast-
changing business conditions.
With SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, your company will have a complete set of tools for creating reports and deploying custom reporting solutions to individual employees across your company.
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Microsoft Business SolutionsAccess to timely financial and operational data from across your company is essential
to intelligent, effective business decision making. Built on SQL Server 2000, Microsoft
Business Solutions streamline the steps required to input and access data, while providing
powerful, easy-to-use financial reporting, budgeting, and planning tools. Microsoft
Business Solutions will enable your company to make smarter, better-informed decisions
based on comprehensive views of financial information that illuminate the impact that
real-time business conditions have on your bottom line.
Microsoft Business Solutions are designed to integrate processes and related financial
details from financial management operations, including accounting, financial planning,
budgeting, human resources, payroll, and project management; Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) systems that are used to manage sales, marketing, and customer
service automation; and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications that automate
and streamline collaboration with partners and suppliers.
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Microsoft Business Solutions for
Analytics–Forecaster. A powerful
budgeting and planning application,
Microsoft Forecaster provides
Web-based tools that make it easy
to collaborate on budgeting and
forecasting. Microsoft Forecaster makes
it easier to create accurate financial
plans, access general ledger data,
and drill back to data sources. With
Microsoft Forecaster, your company
can control costs, project sales, and
take advantage of new opportunities
with greater effectiveness.
Microsoft Business Solutions for
Analytics–Enterprise Reporting.
Microsoft Enterprise Reporting enables
organizations with multiple business
units and locations to gain better
control of their business operations.
With Microsoft Enterprise Reporting,
you can manage complex financial
consolidation and handle detailed
budgeting and planning requirements.
Microsoft Business Solutions for AnalyticsMicrosoft Business Solutions for Analytics
provide the ability to take the volumes of
data collected by financial management,
CRM, and SCM applications and transform
it into business insight that can drive
profitability. Microsoft Business Solutions
for Analytics include:
Microsoft Business Solutions for
Analytics–FRx. The financial reporting
standard for thousands of business
professionals around the world,
Microsoft FRx® software provides high-
performance financial reports that are
easy to create, customize, distribute,
and use. Microsoft FRx simplifies the
reporting process, automating updates,
reducing administrative work, and
enhancing communication, while
providing the ability to drill down into
pinpoint financial information.
Microsoft Enterprise Reporting enables organizations with multiple business units and locations to gain better control of their business operations.
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Extend Your Solutions Through Partners
The success of your business intelligence initiative will depend in part on your ability to deploy
a solution that is tailored to the unique needs of your company and your industry. To help
you build a solution that is right for you, Microsoft has built an extensive network of Business
Intelligence Service Providers. These consultants can work with you to design business
intelligence solutions that will meet your company’s specific needs. These partners include
knowledgeable industry experts who offer services including:
Packaged business intelligence
solutions that can be deployed off the
shelf to address specific business needs.
Industry expertise and consulting,
to help you tailor a solution to a
specific industry or line of business.
Integration services that ensure that
your business intelligence solutions work
seamlessly with the applications and
systems your company uses every day.
Customization, to create a solution
around your unique processes and
the way you do business.
To learn more about Microsoft Business Intelligence service providers or to find a partner in your area, visit:Microsoft Certified Partner referral site at http://mcspreferral.microsoft.com/default.asp
or Microsoft Business Solutions site at http://www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions/
and choose “Request More Information” or “Have Someone Call You Now”
from the “Next Steps” box.
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Business Intelligence Within Reach
Resource CD Table of Contents
Overview
Customer Resources
• Case Studies
• Whitepapers
• In the News
Solutions
Technical Resources
Partners
Additional Resources
• Business Intelligence Websites
• Trial Software Kits
• Competitive
• Technical Sites
• MS Press Books
© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, MapPoint,
SharePoint, SQL Server, and Visio are either registered trademarks or trademarks
of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names
of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of
their respective owners.
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