When it comes to business intelligence, there has been nothing fundamentally innovative in over 20 years.

That's the position the folks at Quantivo are taking as they launch a new business intelligence service for the retail sector at the Demo conference.

Quantivo claims to be the most innovative thing to come along in the world of business intelligence in over 20 years because they have a different approach to not only storing data, but also keeping track of the relationships between different sets of data.

Instead of storing data in rows and columns like a traditional relational database, Quantivo indexes and tags all the data in a proprietary system that makes it easier to identify patterns. This means that not only can users set up the system to track specific sets of data; the system itself will start to alert users to new patterns that it discovers buried in the data. That's like having an extra business analyst embedded in the business intelligence system.

The Quantivo application is designed to be delivered as a service so company officials claim most customers can be up and running any where between on to four days. And while the present offering is tuned specifically for retail customers, the company plans to expand the service out to financial services, telecommunication and electronic commerce environments.

Pricing for the service is based on the actual number of records uploaded into the system and the number of users accessing it. But each user can make an unlimited number of queries.

Going against the established relational database grain may be hard for some people to swallow when it comes to data management. But given the fact that Quantivo is a service it may not matter all that much how they store the data. The significant thing is that this implementation of a business intelligence service can actually recognize patterns. And that means that for the first time, instead of a business intelligence applications confirming what you already know, it might actually tell you something you don't already know. Now that would be real business intelligence.