But despite all the talk of standards, Prebon’s Sanderson, a veteran user of all the big-name middleware packages, remains skeptical that proprietary middleware schemes are a thing of the past. "They can talk openness and standards, but I have to sign the checks. It’s a fairly obvious strategy [to push a single architecture], I don’t blame them for it," he says. On the other hand, he doesn’t want anything to do with it. Sanderson and Patrick McGrath, head of technical strategy, are pursuing a strictly best-of-breed integration approach; a strategy predicated on open standards.

Sanderson has the luxury of spending the money necessary for best of breed since he is in the financial services industry, which competes on being able to serve its customers better information faster than its competitors. "Technology is a key differentiator in what they do," says Austvold. "They are taking on quite a burden in terms of managing different technologies and vendor relationships, but it may well be worth it."

What makes this complexity worthwhile is the ability to put information in the hands of those who did not have it before. Steve Elkins, manager of business intelligence for Capella University in Minneapolis, used Ascential’s MetaStage tool to let his users perform their own queries on a new data warehouse. Previously, if the school’s dean wanted to see how many students failed the advanced management course, for instance, he would have had to ask an IT person to query the legacy reporting database and then wait days or weeks for the result. Now, Ascential’s DataStage product pulls the data from Capella’s business systems and delivers it to the data warehouse. Ascential MetaStage provides the "data dictionary" that makes the data in the warehouse understandable for the school’s users. Brio’s business intelligence tool then acts as the user interface for both the data from the data warehouse and the explanatory meta-data in the MetaStage data dictionary.

Since MetaStage maps types of data from one application (such as the warehouse) to another (such as the business intelligence tool), MetaStage effectively integrates the two, making data accessible where it was not before. Previously, only three IT people at Capella were skilled enough to know how to query the legacy reporting database. With MetaStage doing the heavy lifting of translating between applications and serving the data in an easily comprehensible format, now more than 100 university personnel can do their own queries, greatly improving productivity.