Business intelligence (BI) is not about access to data but what your tools can do with it. This is the view of Tom Camps, director of product management for Cognos Inc. He was answering charges made by Oracle Corp last week (CI No 3,578) that smaller vendors -such as Cognos – would lose out in the BI space to Oracle and SAP AG because they would not have access to data enterprise-wide. Camps utterly refuted this. It’s not about access at all…its about value, tell me what data I can’t access, its just not an issue, he said. He went on to take a potshot at Oracle’s ambitions in the sector, claiming that the company had a challenge – in that they’re trying to do everything. However, Camps professed more respect for the SAP, saying that the German ERP company could create its own market with its in-house efforts to develop business intelligence tools. However, he claimed that there was always space for a company such as Cognos which could respond quickly to market trends.
