Cognos, Business Objects Keep Score

"There's been a lot of growth [in this area] because of all the new corporate governance," said Michael Smith, product marketing manager of Cognos' Corporate Performance Management framework, which aims to integrate discrete applications. "There's been a shift to hundreds and thousands of users [in corporations] where there had been tens of users."

Ottawa-based Cognos is pitching Metrics Manager version 2 as a neutral arbiter of corporate data that eases compliance with government regulations and simplifies the creation of custom reports.

"We can pull from ERP, business intelligence and spreadsheet [applications] ... into a staging area," Smith said. The tool integrates with Cognos' analytics applications and supports popular application servers such as IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and SunONE, he added. Metrics Manager version 2 costs $650 per user.

Dan Volitich, president of John Daniel Associates, a Pittsburgh-based solution provider, said Metrics Manager enables partners that are deploying analytics and business intelligence solutions to offer customers even more functionality. "The training curve is extremely simple," he said. "They've done a nice job defining the click path and making it easy for folks with little training to get value out of the product."

In July, San Jose, Calif.-based Business Objects shipped Performance Manager, which costs $35,000 per server plus $350 per user for a minimum of 25 users.

Meanwhile, other vendors of business intelligence and analytics applications, such as SAS Institute and Hyperion, are beefing up their offerings with new and enhanced reporting capabilities. Microsoft and Oracle, too, are bolstering the analytics features of their databases.

The performance management arena is also giving way to a flurry of merger-and-acquisition activity.

In January, Cognos bought Adaytum for $160 million in stock and cash in an effort to boost its enterprise performance planning capabilities. In July, Business Objects said it would buy Crystal Decisions in an $820 million stock-and-cash deal, and Hyperion unveiled plans to purchase Brio for cash and stock worth about $142 million.