Business Intelligence Lowdown: DB Vendors Jump on BI Bandwagon

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February 17, 2006

DB Vendors Jump on BI Bandwagon

The BI market is continuing to thrive, which is why application and database vendors are also hoping for a piece of the pie. The market, which was till now being catered to by specialist third-party providers like Business Objects, Information Builders and Cognos, is now being permeated by Oracle and SAP.

Appliance vendor Whirlpool is one of those who have ditched BI tools from specialist vendors to invest in SAP's Netweaver Business Intelligence suite, which will help in closing gaps in front-end visualization and reporting capabilities, ease integration requirements, and eliminate the need for employees with multiple skill sets. Others are also switching to BI tools from their database providers as they wish to avoid the isolation that occurs when back-end software is upgraded before the BI vendor can support the update.

But traditional BI vendors still have an advantage since they support disparate data sources, whereas the platform providers generally focus on their own data sources, says John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research. This edge will not last for long though, since IBM has already introduced a BI tool, the DB2 Data Warehouse Edition, which overcomes some of the issues facing other platform vendors by supporting multi-vendor data sources.

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February 17, 2006 in Software | Permalink