If business intelligence (BI) is going to provide a single, accurate picture of corporate performance for the executive board, having a whole suite of different analysis and reporting tools is the wrong way to go about it, says Rob Ashe, CEO of BI vendor Cognos. Ashe, like many others in his market, is promising to take opacity out of BI and, naturally, says his company now has the product to make that kind of standardisation a reality.

For many businesses, BI implementations over the years have been tactical with different departments implementing separate tools for their needs. This has created a patchwork of BI across the enterprise (over 20 is not uncommon at large companies) that is expensive to maintain and leads to heated disagreements when different tools produce inconsistent numbers. "Standardisation on a single set of tools saves on licence costs, internal costs and can improve business performance," says Howard Dressner of analyst group Gartner.

With the launch of Cognos 8BI in September 2005, Cognos is touting the kind of 'complete' BI platform that it claims will deliver all three through a suite that includes web-based query, reporting, analysis, dashboarding and event management functionality. "Large organisations can't maintain the volume of BI tools across departments that we see today. This is what is driving standardisation," says Ashe.

But Cognos is not alone in hungrily eyeing the opportunity that BI standardisation presents: rivals including Business Objects, Hyperion and SAS are all jostling for position, and they are poised to release platforms offering a similar breadth of functionality by the year's end. Part of the attraction for these vendors is that a single enterprise-wide deal typically sends contract values soaring; customers become closely tied in to the tools and less likely to switch vendors.

Where Cognos stands out is on the technical strength of its platform, says Ashe: "Building is better than buying." That is a clear dig at rival Business Objects, which filled a reporting gap in its product suite with the $1.2 billion acquisition of Crystal Decisions back in 2003. Cognos 8 is built on the back of its ReportNet tool, a service-oriented architecture, which first shipped in 2003. This has given Ashe the opportunity to promote the latest suite as "field-tested technology".

However, while Cognos can today talk about a "complete" BI platform, such absolutism is somewhat misleading: the perception of what BI encompasses is broadening. All pure-play BI vendors are aware of the creeping presence of a new breed of competitors, inching their way onto the traditional BI landscape. Enterprise application vendors including SAP and Oracle have increased the analytical capabilities within their products.

Added to this, there is a growing recognition that for BI to provide analysis that is valuable to the business, the tools need to be able to put data in the context of business processes. The result has been a closing of ties between BI vendors and counterparts that can deliver business process management capabilities. Cognos 8 already includes BPM capabilities built through collaborations with FileNet, Savvion, EMC and IBM.

In future, it is possible that Cognos could look to acquire a company such as FileNet or Savvion, concedes Ashe. "That type of deal is consistent with our strategy: it takes us into areas where we don't have products, so there is minimal overlap." With Cognos sitting on just over $400 million in cash, funding such a deal would not be a problem.