Businesses are discovering the competitive advantages that business analytics (BA) provides. Among these benefits include being able to access data with ease as well as meeting numerous regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley. The growing popularity of BA among business managers has prompted the so-called business intelligence (BI) vendors to roll out their own analytics products. This is because it becomes apparent that BI is not enough to handle the various needs of a corporate business. Vendors that are actively making their presence felt in the BA market include SAP and Siebel, which have introduced BI product suites under the analytics banner. Proof to growing importance of analytics is that numerous business processes and functions including corporate finance have integrated analytics products. According to an industry analyst, analytics is the proper term for interacting with information at the speed of business, analyzing and discovering and following through with the appropriate action. People can only discover the real value of analytics by practicing in addition to the training to be provided. Compared to BI, BA targets the business user instead of the IT department. Benefits of BA discussed include its nature as a response-based application geared towards encouraging action instead of informing. In addition, BA also serves as a predictive tool to foresee oncoming events, encourages a business to post questions in the absence of augmentation cycle and product development on the part of the IT department, and goes beyond data preprogrammed analysis into a cube or a warehouse.