COGNOS IS SET to announce on Monday what it calls a "framework" that makes it easier to integrate its various products to build a broader BI (business intelligence) system.

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It's no secret that nearly all of the BI vendors hold tighter integration of their products as a high priority, and Cognos' framework, called Series 7, is part of the company's overall integration strategy.

In January, Cognos will release all of its different capabilities under one banner, according to Karen Williams, director of product marketing at Cognos, in Ottawa.

"We don't want to make customers take things that they don't really need, so we're taking a plug and play, modular approach. This delivers a framework that all of the pieces plug into," Williams said.

When the products are released in January, each box will contain the framework. Customers that buy PowerPlay for instance, can install that, and if they decide to add other Cognos products to their infrastructure later, they can plug them into the framework and the integration work is already done.

Bob Moran, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, in Boston, said that most of the players in the BI space are headed in this direction of tighter integration between applications.

"It's not only requisite to have a suite of tools and applications built on top of it, they have to work together. They have to underpin each other. It's incumbent upon the BI institutions to bear that burden," Moran said.

The Series 7 framework also enhances security through the use of LDAP and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), provides a single place to store metadata, and enables management via a single console and a view into the BI data from a portal environment.

"This gives the end-user the ability to work with information, not work with software," Williams said.

Cognos was not the only BI company making noise recently. Earlier this week, Ascential Software and Hyperion each had announcements of their own.

Ascential, based in Westboro, Mass., updated its DataStage XE and XE/390 products and released three new products: the XE Portal Edition 1.0, DataStage Pack 1.0 for PeopleSoft, and DataStage Pack 1.0 for Siebel. The common theme among the products is integration, both among the DataStage family and between other applications, including CRM, ERP, legacy data, and homegrown systems.

On its end, Hyperion, in Sunnyvale, Calif., issued new versions of its planning and business modeling packages. The company said that customers can use these products to more closely align operational behavior with planning and forecasting, the end result of which is better decision making.

Aberdeen's Moran said that information about changes that can have long-term effects is becoming one of the most important types of intelligence for companies to monitor.

"You have to manage on the delta, meaning you need to manage that which changes and only that which changes. You cannot keep revisiting things that stay the same," Moran added.