Columnist’s corner: What with all the acquisition activity in the business intelligence fray — IBM buying Cognos, SAP snapping up Business Objects — Ephraim Schwartz points out that, “BI will disappear as a separate application category soon enough.” While that may be inevitable, the remaining vendors “don’t subscribe to my bleak view of their future.” Pure-play BI vendors strike back. Take MicroStrategy, for instance, and a new focus other vendors are putting on operational, rather than strategic or managerial, business intelligence applications. “Perhaps point-solution BI vendors will not only survive but flourish and the recent acquisitions by the giants only serve to reinvigorate rather than replace the pure-plays.” Related: IBM Cognos deal highlights resurgence in upgrading the database, and SAP’s Business Objects acquisition: The death knell for point solutions? Gripe Line: “It’s always disturbing to find a vendor playing a little too fast and loose with confidential information about its customers,” Ed Foster begins. In this case, that’s DirecTV, which was bandying about some customer info such that another could see it — and claimed it could not inform the violated customer as part of some privacy protection tactic. In short: a reader received a bill with someone else’s name and account number on it. “I asked why giving his account information to me was OK in their eyes since it was their mistake, but correcting their mistake was a problem? I was told that I would be ‘transferred to their Internet people’ whereupon the call was disconnected.” DirecTV won’t correct privacy gaffe. Now, our reader still has access to that other person’s account. “Since he has no intention of taking advantage of the situation, perhaps no harm will come if he does nothing,” Foster writes. “What if the original mistake is due to endemic problems with DirecTV’s system that bad folks are already exploiting?” What should our reader do in this, his moral quandary? Talkback below or at the link above. Software Development