BI Rivals Debut Data Integration AdvancesBI Rivals Debut Data Integration Advances

Two of the premier stand-alone business intelligence vendors separately announced data integration initiatives designed to satisfy customers' growing need to tap scattered and diverse businesses information.

Cognos said on Tuesday it will embed enterprise information integration (EII) software into its popular ReportNet BI tool through an original equipment manufacturer agreement with EII vendor Composite Software. Cognos also made a $4.5 million equity investment in Composite.

The pact is designed to let Cognos customers carry out reporting and analysis that combine historic business information from data warehouses with real-time operational information, without moving or copying data.

Integration from multiple data sources is a growing requirement for enterprise BI users that want to augment their warehouses with more dynamic data from Java applications, the Internet and other sources.

Also Tuesday, Cognos rival Business Objects announced its own agreement with an EII vendor, saying it has built support for technology from Attunity into Business Objects Data Integration 6.5. The two firms also plan joint technical, sales and marketing activities.

"Many of our enterprise customers house a large percentage of critical business data in mainframe and legacy systems. One of Attunity's strengths is providing seamless access to these systems," Business Objects director of product marketing Darren Cunningham said in a prepared statement.

The agreement lets users of Business Objects Data Integration update their data warehouses and data marts in real time by moving only the changes to operational data sources. Attunity captures changes to data in relational and non-relational sources and streams those changes to Business Objects' integration platform.

Business Objects and Attunity said some of their joint customers are already using Attunity technology with integration, reporting and query and analysis applications from Business Objects.

The announcements from Cognos and Business Objects come a day after Oracle said it will sell a BI tool capable of handling data access, analysis, reporting and data integration. That product, which is slated for release in the first quarter of 2005, amps up the growing level of competition aimed at stand-alone BI vendors from big enterprise software companies.