Bear Sterns chooses Cognos ReportNet

International finance house Bear Sterns is one of the first companies to sign up for ReportNet business intelligence software from Cognos.

ReportNet is a web-based reporting tool launched this week that uses web services standards such as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol.

It accesses multiple databases to produce business reports and graphs in a print or web format.

The server-based software supports dynamic HTML and Java and is compatible with SAP and Oracle databases. The company also released the software development kit to developers.

Other early adopters include BMW and educational publisher Alfred Publishing.

Ashe Vasthare, managing director of Bear Sterns' fixed income business unit, said that last year the company began investigating a move to a single reporting strategy to cut costs.

"We identified a few key vendors of business intelligence systems and drew up a list of our requirements," he said.

"We decided to partner with Cognos because it has zero footprint for ease of deployment and the software development kit allows us to customise the product for our extranet."

Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at analyst Gartner, suggested that large companies will choose one or two business intelligence products, but that no single product or vendor will dominate the global market.

"The business intelligence market is consolidating at the moment and we will see big providers getting bigger and small ones getting smaller," he told vnunet.com.

"I see most large companies standardising on two or three products between them."

In a separate move, Cognos competitor Business Objects released version 6.1 of its enterprise reporting tool, which integrates LDap-based directories and has been made easier to integrate into enterprise software.