Sprint is widening a deployment of business intelligence reporting technology from MicroStrategy as part of plans to whittle down the number of BI applications currently in use at the $27 billion company.

The telecommunications giant is deploying MicroStrategy's Report Services tool for call-traffic analysis, marketing analysis, financial performance assessment and Web-traffic analysis, it was announced Wednesday. The implementation is part of a broader IT initiative at Sprint dubbed Target State Architecture that's designed to help the company reduce costs by consolidating IT operations into a centrally management environment.

There are BI applications from more than a dozen vendors currently in use at Sprint. The company has no formal timeline for removing the other reporting applications, but it will cease new developments with those technologies, a source at Sprint said.

The ongoing MicroStrategy deployment marks the expansion of an 8-year-old relationship between Sprint and the vendor. Currently 16,000 Sprint employees use MicroStrategy for work on 27 separate business applications.