This paper is about business intelligence as the key factor of business excellence, as well as about the business intelligence service as a concentrated expression of business intelligence, which does not represent cost - but investment. By this we mean the regular versus irregular, and allowed versus illicit collection of business information. The illicit and irregular collection of information belongs to the area of business espionage, i.e. to the notorious area of industrial espionage. The paper elaborates on business espionage as well as on net espionage which relates to science and technology. It also mentions country intelligence. The paper draws a firm line between the allowed business intelligence based on the so-called open sources and business espionage which is based on the so-called closed sources. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT