Today, organizations looking to grow their businesses have the opportunity to adopt innovative analytics applications to facilitate the process. New generation applications, coupled with modern database technologies and cutting-edge hardware, will enable organizations to rapidly generate actionable business insights to increase competitive advantage. At the same time, organizations must not only evaluate the performance of these business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications and the systems required to run them, but also their cost-effectiveness, compatibility with existing IT assets, capacity to meet growing organizational requirements, and ability to ensure business continuity.