THE GROWING importance of business intelligence is quickly creating new competitors, as dedicated business-intelligence vendors and traditional platform vendors vie to meet users' analytical and reporting needs.

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Both Cognos and Oracle this week will unveil new business-intelligence offerings aimed at simplifying the use of and access to analytic reports.

The difference, however, is in the delivery.

From Cognos' standpoint, its platform-independent approach to business intelligence provides the capability of reaching across a broad range of data sources in a way that platform vendors cannot, said Tom Camps, vice president of marketing at Cognos, in Ottawa.

Oracle's Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of the customer relationship management (CRM) product division, offered the opposite view.

"I think only application vendors can provide business intelligence," Barrenechea said. "They must be tightly integrated to CRM and ERP [enterprise resource planning]. They must be self-service and must run against your transactional data."

Brian Anderson, CIO for the City of Philadelphia, however, believes there is a great deal of value in bringing in a business-intelligence specialist rather than relying on the analytics provided by platform vendors.

The City of Philadelphia, Anderson said, had considered Oracle products but was concerned that, because Oracle's offerings are so tightly integrated, going with Oracle could lock the city into using only Oracle-based products. For that reason, Anderson decided to tab Cognos for the city's analytical and reporting needs.

"Though we would like to have one common data warehouse, our enterprise doesn't look like that. We have data all over the place," Anderson said. "It's just more practical to have a logical enterprise definition of data that can be housed in multiple places."

Cognos Inc., in Ottawa, is at www.cognos.com. Oracle Corp., in Redwood Shores, Calif., is at www.oracle.com.