Every major BI vendor claims to support BI-driven business performance management (BPM). In reality, many of these products are simply business dashboards that create fancy displays of business metrics.

A "true" BPM product not only creates and displays business metrics, but also ties those metrics back to business goals and targets. This allows business users to compare actuals against plans and to take actions when targets are in jeopardy.

As BI applications have been moving gradually towards supporting a BPM environment, business planning has also been changing. Companies are moving away from spreadsheet chaos and toward the use of shared Web-based and desktop-based planning systems. At the same time, these companies are also looking beyond budgeting in the planning process. They are also taking into account factors like employee retention, and customer retention and satisfaction, into account.

Cognos, Hyperion and SAP all have planning products and they have begun to realize that integrating business planning with business intelligence gives them a competitive edge over BI competitors such as Business Objects and Microstrategy.

When Cognos acquired Adaytum, Business Objects said this was a mistake because the financial planning marketplace was a mature and saturated. Business Objects has been proved wrong. Companies are expanding their planning processes and are looking to acquire more advanced planning systems. As they deploy these systems, these companies will quickly realize the importance of have an integrated BI environment that enables them to validate plans and iteratively modify them as business circumstances change.

It would appear that Business Objects in acquiring SRC has realized its mistake. As always it's not only a matter of providing functionality, but also of integrating that functionality with existing products. There is no question that Cognos, Hyperion and SAP have a head start here. The key point to note, however, is that business planning is now becoming a key component of the BI environment.

Currently I am conducting a research project on data integration for the data warehousing institute (TDWI). The results will be published in a TDWI report and Webcast in October.

The premise of the research report is that organizations are moving toward (or need to move toward) an enterprise-wide data integration strategy (of which data warehousing is a piece). It will look at different types of data integration (consolidation, federation, propagation) and data integration technology (EAI, EII, ETL, MDM). It will discuss why these technologies complement, rather than compete, with each other and suggest which technology should be used when. It will also look at requirements for data integration products and look at the concept of a data integration center.

I am interested to hear if you agree with the premise of the paper. The topic of the data integration center is also very interesting. Several companies I have interviewed either have, or are planning to have, a data integration center. Both Ascential (IBM) and Informatica are pushing this concept. Informatica recently published a book on the data integration centers and it is worth reading, even if you aren't an Informatica customer. You can find the book on Amazon.

All comments welcome. Colin.

There are also some rapidly evolving fields I am interested in including business process management, open source solutions, and the impact of sensor networks and RFID on business intelligence and data warehousing.

I am excited about the opportunity to share and discuss industry happenings with you all and so please help keep the blog going by joining in the discussion.