Do you want to plan your next move based on the best information from the largest business database available?

Prior to the start of the Information Age, businesses intelligence (BI) relied on the collection of data from non-automated sources. Businesses then lacked the computing resources to properly search, collect and analyze the data, and as a result, companies often made business decisions primarily on the basis of intuition.

As businesses started automating more and more systems, more and more data became available. However, collection remained a challenge due to a lack of infrastructure for data exchange or to incompatibilities between systems. Analysis of the data that was gathered and reports on the data sometimes took months to generate. Such reports allowed informed long-term strategic decision-making. However, short-term tactical decision-making continued to rely on intuition.

This has all changed with the Internet age. The Web is the world's largest information warehouse, and each day it adds millions of new pages containing news and updates regarding industries, companies and products. Business intelligence has now become the art of searching and sifting through large amounts of data, extracting pertinent information, and turning that information into knowledge from which actions can be taken.

Mercator provides consulting on strategies for finding information on the web using advanced search methods, and trains companies on the most innovative techniques to gather business intelligence on competitors and business partners. Mercator also advices regarding suitable methods to gather information from the "hidden web", automatically gather relevant industry news and analyze the relevant data. In addition, Mercator provides consulting for the creation and maintenance of decision-support systems fed by the information gathered.