LONDON, September 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- Who Better Than the World's Leading Consultants in Competitor Intelligence to Evaluate the CI Software Packages Commercially Available Today?

Fuld & Co, based in both London, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have just released an updated version of their independent view of Competitive Intelligence Software. Although there are no clear winners, Cipher, Coemergence, Strategy Software and Wincite all come out well, with each of them scoring 'excellent' for planning and direction. These four packages also scored well on the report and inform functions. In the analysis and production functions scores were considerably lower all round with only Brimstone scoring a 'very good'.

Full details of the report can be found on the Fuld website at http://www.fuld.com

The report's principle author, Leonard Fuld, states the main findings from the data:

Technology has come a long way in its ability to help companies track and use competitive information. Technology requires both a multi-year budgetary and personal commitment on the part of those running the business unit or corporation. Senior management must have patience to invest in and allow the intelligence programme to mature, to give it enough time to grow and learn from its lessons - before it considers investing in an intelligence technology. Process and people: These are two key ingredients needed for a successful intelligence programme. They are the two other partners, aside from technology, that will allow a programme to become world class.

This evaluation is released at the same time as a Global CI Benchmarking Project. This was undertaken amongst almost 500 companies worldwide by Fuld, and thought to be the largest in the industry and it ranks "World Class" characteristics. Asian, and Latin American corporate intelligence technology users considered themselves to be "more sophisticated" than those in the US and Europe. For detail see Tech Super Users & Tech Kryptonite on http://www.fuld.com.

Published by Fuld & Company for the past decade, The Intelligence Software Report is the first publication to review technologies in the competitive intelligence industry. Fuld & Company, based in Cambridge, Mass (US) with offices in London (UK), is the world's pre-eminent research and consulting firm in the field of competitive intelligence.

Media info and interviews: Contact Jane Martin at à propos, +44(0)20-8996-1760, jane@a-propos.co.uk