Consolidation among business intelligence software vendors is giving enterprises a choice of integrated offerings, all from the same vendors, and the promise of reduced IT overhead.
Hyperion Solutions Corp. is extending its offerings from business performance management into BI with plans it detailed late last month to integrate its software with technology it recently acquired from Brio Software.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., companys first integrated platform offering is due by early next year. An entire new platform will be available by the first quarter of next year, company officials said.
Integration efforts will focus on integrating the former Brio Performance Suite products with Hyperions Business Performance Management suite applications, which would allow customers to combine financial data from Hyperion applications with operational data from transactional systems.
Combining Brios Metrics Builder with Hyperion will produce a metrics management solution that includes score carding, prepackaged and custom dashboards, and activity monitoring.
Mike Burkes, data technology manager for enterprise data management at Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc., said one area of integration hed like to see is Hyperions Analyzer application integrated with Brio Performance Suite. Analyzer has limited capabilities compared with the Brio applications and cant go against relational databases, Burkes said. However, it does have financial reporting capabilities that no Brio product can match, he said.
“I dont really see much overlap in their products,” said Burkes, in Torrance, Calif. “When they get it all together, it should be a successful offering.”
Meanwhile, Cognos Inc. has already integrated planning, budgeting and forecasting technology it acquired from Adaytum Inc. with its query, reporting and analysis tools and introduced a new enterprise reporting application, ReportNet, earlier this fall. The Ottawa-based company plans to add personalization, collaboration and business activity monitoring capabilities to its applications over the next year.