Clearing up business intelligence

As part of its aggressive portal strategy, Lotus will bundle Seagate Software's Crystal Enterprise into its K-Station portal. The arrangement brings the infrastructure to power business intelligence content, delivery, management and security into the K-Station environment. The agreement is the next step in the three-year Seagate/Lotus relationship, which has focused on bringing the Crystal Reports business intelligence solution into the Notes and Domino environment.

K-Station is a combination of Lotus portal technologies and services with collaborative tools such as Sametime and QuickPlace. K-station is designed to give users a single point of access to information and can stand alone or be integrated with other services and offerings, including the Discovery Server when it becomes available.

Lotus believes it's critical for an enterprise to have the ability to quickly locate diverse content and expertise within or outside an organization, have immediate access to this information and have the opportunity to work, meet and make quick decisions within that same single point of access.

Lotus claims traditional portal technology allows users to access different systems through a portal interface, while K-station collects, documents and stores pieces of the decision-making process to be reused in the future. The result, the company claims, gives users a clear understanding of how decisions were made, why they were made and the steps involved in the process, all based on the information gathered.