In-Depth

Business Objects/Kalido Partnership Tackles Data Quality

Is the information you’re funneling to business decision-makers accurate and reliable?

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 12/10/2003

That’s one of the most intractable of problems that besets enterprises as they ratchet up integration among disparate systems to enable real-time delivery of business-critical information (see http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=745).

Last month, business intelligence powerhouse Business Objects SA and Kalido Ltd., a UK-based provider of data warehouse lifecycle management (DWLM) products, formed an alliance to tackle this problem. The two companies plan to ratchet up integration between Kalido’s DWLM suite—software that automates the creation and management of data warehouses—and Business Objects’ Enterprise 6 end-to-end BI suite. The goal? A combined offering designed to ensure the consistency, accuracy, and timeliness of information that reaches business decision-makers.

“In today's fast-moving world, corporate management teams need accurate and up-to-date business performance information,” said Business Objects president and chief operating officer John Olsen in a statement. “Having worked together with Kalido on several blue-chip customer projects, we are very excited about the potential for our technology alliance to meet this demand.”

As a result of this integration, organizations will be able to funnel data from Kalido DWLM into Business Objects dashboards and reports used by business decision-makers. The two companies claim that this combined solution provides an accurate and date-stamped audit trail of past performance changes, along with a view of current performance across the enterprise.

Integration will be provided at various stages, starting with dynamic updating of Business Objects’ reporting tools by means of metadata exchange between Kalido DWLM Suite and Enterprise 6. Kalido and Business Objects have also announced plans to co-sell and co-market combined offerings in the United States and Europe.

The two partners point to their past collaboration on similar such efforts, and say that their respective products are also highly complementary. “We know from our work together on a number of customer implementations that our products are already highly complementary, and jointly provide a robust intelligence platform for enhanced performance management,” said Kalido chief executive officer Bob Potter in a statement.

Kalido and Business Objects have pledged to introduce additional initiatives that further tighten integration between their products in the future.

Analysts caution that companies that implement real-time infrastructures need to figure out how they’re going to ensure the quality of the data they’re providing to business decision-makers.

“There’s really no process there that ensures that the data is cleansed or integrated, so they often have to decide between sacrificing the integrity of the data or processing the data so fast,” confirmed Mike Schiff, a senior analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., in an interview earlier this year.