Business Objects SA is inviting customers to try out prototype Web 2.0 applications to enhance its business-intelligence software, although the tools are getting mixed reviews.

The company has been posting what it calls "BI 2.0" applications on its Business Objects Labs Web site for several months, asking customers to try them out and offer feedback. They resemble what other companies call Web 2.0 programs, using ideas such as application mashups and Web collaboration.

This week it posted BI Annotator, which provides a way to combine external data feeds with the structured data in a data warehouse. An agricultural business might combine a feed of local temperatures with internal data about farm crop yields, for example. The idea is to include more "contextual" information to arrive at better business decisions.

Another tool is BI Desktop, for creating small programs, or widgets, that sit on a desktop and display current BI information. Others include the Business Objects Masher for combining online services, and BI Collaborator, a plug-in for Windows Live Messenger that lets users chat and exchange business intelligence data through instant messaging.

The tools are only prototypes and not for production use, and Business Objects said they may or may not be turned into actual products.

Neil Raden, founder of the business intelligence consulting company Hired Brains, said some of the tools show creative thinking, but on the whole he was disappointed. "These data mashup capabilities are entertaining, but I don't really see that they have any enduring value," he wrote in a blog posting.

Enterprise software vendors aren't being creative enough, he said. They are drawing too much from Web 2.0 ideas that have proved successful on the Internet instead of coming up with radical new ways to manage the exploding volumes of data that businesses have to deal with.

"Data management in large companies is still rooted in databases and relational data modelling," he said in a telephone interview. "There isn't time to formulate an analysis for everything, but if the data were a lot smarter then it could rearrange itself."

He proposed a data model for business intelligence in which information is not only described, but in which the relationship of data to other data is also revealed, "so you can get to the meaning of things and not just the description of them."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.