In an effort to become a one-stop shop for corporate customers, IBM Corp has signed a deal with Brio Technology Inc, to sell an own-brand version of the business intelligence vendor’s Enterprise 6 suite, optimized for its DB2 database. IBM and Brio are targeting customers that want to use the software for traditional report and query functions, or as a development environment for analytical applications.
Brio has tweaked the DB2, DB2 OLAP Services and Visual Warehouse support in the Brio Enterprise: IBM DB2 edition. Nick Halsey, VP of business development at Brio, said that agreement to resell the software represented a significant extension of the relationship between IBM and Brio.
However, Mike Norman, senior analyst at the Data warehousing Tools Bulletin, described IBM’s business intelligence strategy as unfocused, saying it was not clear where the company was going with the Brio deal. He said that IBM currently had a mish-mash of poorly integrated tools for business intelligence purposes – something that Halsey disputed – and relied on its services arm to tailor these for the customer business. This meant compared to a company like Microsoft Corp, which has forged ahead with BI applications based on its SQL7 server, IBM’s strategy appeared fuzzy, although the customer may get a better tailored result because of the work that the services put in on integrating the IBM package.
The Brio Enterprise 6 Suite and the IBM-branded version will be available on July 1. The IBM edition of the Brio suite only supports DB2, customers can upgrade to the full Brio Suite if access to other databases is required.
