BI bigwigs ramp up platforms

BI vendors Firstlogic, IBM, Informatica, and SAS Institute are all working to broaden the reach of their respective BI platforms via extensions to their product lines focused on data integration.

SAS will announce this week a suite of customer intelligence applications that will be the first to plug into the SAS 9 platform for data integration announced at the end of March.

The suite of analytic CRM applications is targeted at fraud prevention, regulatory requirements for money laundering, and — on the sales side — so-called inbound marketing.

“It consolidates the customer data and uses analytics to segment and extract that segment for the most likely to respond to a targeted campaign,” said Jim Davis, senior vice president at SAS.

IBM is boosting BI within its On Demand initiative in the long term and inside its database in the short term with a forthcoming beta of DB2 database technology dubbed Masala, company officials said. Masala will feature an enterprise search paradigm that crawls the Web to find information on a given topic. Just as important, Masala will integrate text mining with near real-time analytics. IBM plans to issue a beta of Masala in the next couple of months, according to Janet Perna, IBM’s general manager of data management software.

“BI cuts through everything we’re doing,” Perna said.

IBM’s renewed interest in BI will span several of its products, including the DB2 database, DB2 Information Integrator, and WebSphere Portal, Perna said. The goal is to offer real-time BI that includes active data warehousing and that supports high-volume transactions, embedded analytics, and the ability to query in a mixed fashion across structured and unstructured data sources.

“In the past BI was all about searching and finding historical data. But applying and integrating real-time analytics is what will push BI down to the masses. It is where we really need to get to as an industry,” said Karen Parrish, IBM’s vice president of BI.

Analysts said that integration is a key aspect of BI.

“Companies need to focus on scalability: How much data do they have? How much data do they need to process? The higher-end tools will connect to a very large number of data sources. They need to look at integrating into the development framework that their company has established,” said Paul Kirby, a research director at AMR Research.

Informatica, for its part, will announce a shared services architecture dubbed UDS (Universal Data Services).

“What an application server does for applications, we do for data services,” said Karen Steele, vice president of corporate marketing at Informatica.

The data server provides the foundation capabilities of security, scheduling, and performance, as well as data integration, which includes transformation, mapping, and data cleansing.

Firstlogic will unveil a new data quality integration framework this week designed to allow companies to cleanse data that comes from disparate front-end and transactional systems for customer profiling and other BI projects.