BI Is Not Middleware

Ventana QuickTake™

Oracle's recent acquisition of Siebel and its Business Analytics product line has raised the question of whether, in product packaging and positioning terms, business intelligence (BI) should be separate from middleware. Oracle has historically made its BI part of the middleware product line, now called Fusion. But IT and business executives through their purchasing power and the strategic priorities they've set have made BI a specific technology segment that is used for strategic business purposes. Middleware on the other hand increasingly is being viewed in the same light as the application servers and integration technologies that IT uses to build and integrate applications.

We think it's reasonable for organizations to expect from their technology supplier a commitment to BI in the form of a dedicated marketing, sales, services and product organization; otherwise, they may see their interests pushed aside by technology advances and capabilities oriented to developers and not business users. Ventana Research believes that BI is a distinct, and indeed a critical, information technology required to support organizations in their performance management processes.

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2006 Ventana Research