Intelligent Enterprise

People are acting surprised because IBM bought the last of the big BI platform vendors. I can't figure out why. The marriage of IBM and Cognos has been whispered about for several years. IBM kept saying "we don't want to be in the application business," but they also weren't in the ETL business or the content applications business either.

As a software vendor, IBM is all about enterprise infrastructure. BI as it's talked about today is mostly reporting infrastructure, and as such has become mainstream infrastructure — exactly the sort of thing IBM does.

Being an infrastructure and platform vendor, IBM can't afford to piss off its application partners. Now that the big BI vendors have been acquired by partners/competitors, IBM is free to sell products in that market without worrying too much about damaging relationships.

My view of BI is that it's one of the three application stacks in the enterprise architecture, next to the OLTP stack and the communications and integration stack. It only became obvious when packaged application vendors began adding BI capabilities to their applications and buying up BI vendors. IBM now has complete coverage across the entire enterprise infrastructure stack for OLTP, BI and integration/communications.

What will be interesting is how this changes the market. BI tools have been in need of a split, separating the user interface components from the data access components, in much the same way that client-server computing in the '80s-'90s separated the UI and client from the server.

By making the data access and query elements separate components from the UI, we can take advantage of the BI and data warehousing infrastructure from more than just reporting tools. It means the data warehouse and BI can enter the SOA world and match up with what's happening on the Web today. Let's hope IBM decides to lead the way in this area.