Says 2009 is the "breakthrough year" for business intelligence.

Microsoft gold partner Intellimax Solutions has completed the development on stage two of the national ICT skills database, allowing government agencies to create their own reports from the information.

The database, built on a Microsoft business intelligence stack, was funded by the Australian Government via the IT contract and recruitment association (ITCRA) in 2006.

Intellimax helped ITCRA create the database, which took between six and nine months.

"We completed stage one [of the build] but then found clients wanted to create and build their own reports. That's why stage two came about," Intellimax managing director Peter Randle said.

"Stage two has just been released in the past week and includes the ability for [government] agencies and corporate clients to run reports from Microsoft Excel and to use Excel to create their own reports.

"Individual companies and agencies have different reasons why they want the information. They need to know how people are moving around the industry, where candidates came from, age range, remuneration, position description [and so on]. Stage two allows them to filter the database by whatever they need."

The skills database had "over 20,000" individual records of ICT job placements across all industry segments in the past three years. That figure represented around 30 percent of total placements in the period.

At least 20 recruitment agencies fed the placement information into the database, which was built around SQL Server 2005 with Office 2007 at the front-end.

Randle believed 2009 had "been a breakthrough year" for business intelligence projects moving forward - particularly those built on a Microsoft platform.

"It comes down to the fact that people are seeing Microsoft as a serious business intelligence framework," Randle said.

Bruno Aziza, worldwide strategy lead for business intelligence at Microsoft, said the fact that many customers already had the software pieces for a business intelligence project - SQL Server, Office and SharePoint - in their environments provided a "great business model for a partner."

Partners could go into the customer site and create a business intelligence system on those elements, he said.

"The value customers get out of the integration of tools they already own is invaluable," Aziza said.

"Partners gravitate around that because they can build tools around the platforms that Microsoft can provide."

Aziza is the co-author of a book, "Drive Business Performance: Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution", the contents of which he was promoting to partners at a series of events in Australia this week. Randle also presented at the events.

Intellimax is based in Brisbane and also has an office in Sydney. Its clients included Ausenco and Price Attack.