The last few months has seen a lot of interest from both data warehousing and BI vendors in applying content management technologies and using unstructured data in decision making applications. In the content management technology area, for example, Business Objects, Cognos, and Information Builders have all announced support for search in their BI tools.

For accessing unstructured data, Composite Software and IBM have for some time supported federated data access to many different types of unstructured data. The data integration vendors are now also beginning to increase their support for extracting unstructured data, and transforming and loading it into a data warehouse. Informatica already offers a PowerCenter option for handling unstructured data based on technology from Itemfield. This option has been particularly popular with financial and healthcare companies for processing industry specific XML formatted data. Informatica announced this week its intent to acquire Itemfield for approximately $55 million.

There is considerable business value in unstructured data and we are likely to see increasing interest in bringing this type of data into the BI and data warehousing environment. This data will be used not only to improve the power of traditional BI analytical processing, but also to create new e-business intelligence applications for supporting business requirements such as e-pricing and e-discovery.

The latest CIO spending survey from Merrill Lynch shows that BI is still number one on the list of software spending intentions by CIOs. Some 40 percent of CIOs listed BI as a top priority. Equal second were security and corporate portals where 34 percent of CIOs listed these technologies as a top spending priority. For more information about the study contact Merrill Lynch.