However, Hagerty also noted that the traditional BI vendors have the advantage of supporting disparate data sources, whereas the platform providers generally focus on their own data sources.

IBM 's BI tool, the DB2 Data Warehouse Edition, overcomes some of the issues facing other platform vendors by supporting multivendor data sources.

Todd Grinaway, director of data warehousing and senior IT manager at a large health insurance company in Pennsylvania, plans to use the IBM tool set, unveiled last year, to access data from multiple sources.

Grinaway also noted that using the IBM BI tools means that there "is one less finger-pointing exercise I have to go through" when something goes wrong.

Nonetheless, the firm still uses third-party tools where appropriate, he said. For instance, the company plans to continue using BI tools from Business Objects for enterprise reporting.