Our Accelerated Analytics product was recently highlighted in the retail blog ShiSh List. We recommend taking a look at their posting as well as looking around the blog. Lots of good content on retail collaboration.
Accelerated Analytics was designed and built using Microsoft SQL 2005 and ProClarity (for the non-geek that means latest great technology) for business users to perform category management analysis, POS data analysis, and to support collaboration between retailers and their vendors.