Oracle continued its push into the business intelligence (BI) market yesterday by launching a new BI suite designed to provide enhanced reporting and analysis across firms' heterogenous IT environments.

Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition integrates Oracle's BI middleware with analytics technology recently acquired from Siebel. It also exploits Oracle's hot-pluggable middleware to collect and analyse data held in both Oracle and non-Oracle databases and applications, the company said.

Kevin Henderson, BI Solutions house leader at Oracle, said the Enterprise Edition's ability to operate in a heterogenous IT environment would allow Oracle to compete more effectively with BI specialists such as Business Objects and Cognos. "Previously, [Oracle's BI efforts] have focused on the Oracle database, " he admitted. "But with Siebel Analytics built to be open to any database and Oracle Middleware's hot-pluggable capabilities the suite is as effective in a heterogenous world."

Oracle has also launched a new Standard Edition BI suite, designed to deliver enhanced reporting capabilities in a pure Oracle environment, and a new Standard Edition One version tailored for small and medium businesses.

The release of the Enterprise Edition follows criticism from specialist BI vendors that application vendors, such as Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, have failed to offer BI tools that integrate effectively with a wide range of applications and databases.