Resources - Emerging trends in business analysis. With economic expansion in new markets starting to make the headlines, Business Monitor International is targeting its BMO service on a wider audience, including the academic sector. Mark Chillingworth logged on to see what unique market insights it had to offer.

Not a day passes without the business news agenda featuring emerging markets. Countries once hidden behind the Iron Curtain are now fast becoming major international manufacturing and trading forces. The business community is hungry for the latest data on these nations, and so is academia. For this reason, Business Monitor International has entered the ivory tower market with its flagship online service.

Business Monitor Online (BMO) is an online interface that connects users with the entire range of content available from Business Monitor International (BMI). The site contains 1,900 reports on economics, politics and countries, as well as 531 quarterly industry sector reports. BMI has a strong heritage in reports on emerging markets - not surprising as its founders originally specialised in market intelligence on Central and South America.

Once users are logged onto BMO they are presented with a clean interface that is loaded with options, yet there is lots of white space on the screen, making for a functional and uncluttered page. At the centre of the homepage are three tabs for the main products on offer: BMI Reports, Data & Forecasts, and Alerts and Analysis. Below each of these are pink boxes that show users the sub-categories for each tab, and explain each option.

The benefit of this system is that it concentrates a user's mind on the type of report they require rather than rushing to use keyword searching. The sub-categories allow users to select the type of data they want, whether it is Country Updates, Sales & Exports, Fixed Income, Country Forecasts, Risk Ratings or Company Intelligence.

Within the masthead of the site sit a pair of drop-down menus - Select Service and Select Geography. These allow users to quickly construct a range of research - Select Service allows you to choose a business area or type of report and then select the country you wish to research from the second window.

BMI has market analysts based at its headquarters in London, and all the content that users access is produced in-house by these analysts. They appear to write a mass of reports, and these are independent and written with a simple-to-understand style that is easily accessible for any information professional, academic or professional looking to research or understand business sectors in emerging markets. The opening paragraphs to articles instantly map out the main facts and issues, making it clear to users what the subject is and the basis of the analysis. Economics stories come with plenty of tables for analysis.

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