Intelligent Enterprise

What could be more handy than a point-by-point comparison -- and ranking -- of the business intelligence suites your organization might be considering? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be a teleporter.

Or maybe a real-life, fully functional crystal ball. Here at Business Intelligence Pipeline, we don't have either of those. But we do have the BI platform comparison, right here at your disposal.

Our head-to-head comparison from Network Computing magazine includes reviews of Actuate 8 with Service Pack 1, Applix's TM1, Cognos' Enterprise BI Series 7, Information Builders' WebFocus 7, Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Analysis Services, and MicroStrategy 8. See how they match up. Or if you're short on time, you can skip right to the winner.

While you're checking out those comparisons, you might also want to see news on Applix's debut, this week, of an upgraded version of its performance management suite, TM1 9.0.

On to other another topic: data and applications integration. BI experts and business executives need to educate themselves in order to grasp both the appropriate frequency and types of integration interchange they need if they're going to pull information together for analysis effectively.

So let's focus on integration technology, and the varied approaches vendors in that area use to tackle the problem. That article points out, for example, that IBM intends to deliver a full integration suite with application, message-event, data and information technologies. Informatica, in contrast, supports data consolidation, migration, replication and synchronization. Other vendors take yet other approaches. Want to integrate your data successfully? Of course you do. Then get a handle on what type of integration you need and how often you need it.