Replacing most of its third-party BI tools with SAP software will ease Whirpool's integration requirements and eliminate the need for employees with multiple skill sets, he added.

John I. Haas Inc., a Washington-based producer of hops used in beer manufacturing, decided a year ago to buy BI tools from Oracle Corp. rather than from traditional BI vendors. The company wanted to avoid the disconnect that often occurs when back-end software is upgraded before the BI vendor can support the update, said Kyle Lambert, vice president of information systems.

Haas plans to upgrade the BI tools in April when it installs Oracle's E-Business Suite 11i.10.

John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston, said the enterprise application vendors -- traditionally focused on transaction proc-essing rather than analysis -- have increased their focus on BI as users buy more tools from the BI-centric vendors.

"The enterprise vendors saw this as money they were leaving on the table," he said. As a result, the traditional BI players are "getting knocked around a little bit" by the enterprise application vendors. Multiple Data Sources