At its Insight Europe user event in Berlin, business intelligence (BI) vendor Business Objects unveiled its intentions to push further into unstructured data analysis and on-demand services, announcing plans to acquire information discovery specialist Inxight Software and giving a preview of its new Information OnDemand offering.

Privately-owned Inxight specialises in helping enterprises get a view of unstructured data, such as emails and web content. It also offers a federated search tool, allowing firms to search across public resources such as Yahoo and Google, as well as private information sources.

The acquisition is designed to give firms a unified view of structured information held in data warehouses and databases, as well as unstructured data. It will also help companies gain an understanding of the “human” side of their data, such as the thoughts and feelings of customers, Business Objects said.

“Firms haven’t had a view of their customers combining quantitative and qualitative information,” said Marge Breya, Business Objects’ senior vice-president and chief marketing officer. “There might be negative support emails from your biggest customer [residing in corporate systems].”

Breya cited disgraced utilities company Enron as an example of how this technology could be of benefit. “The information available about Enron to the outside world from public resources and the financial view painted a very different picture to what was going on from the inside, which was pretty scandalous,” she explained. “They would have seen code names running out of their organisation and the view could have predicted that the organisation was rotten. But the outside numbers didn’t give that view until it was too late.”

Breya added that Business Objects aims to launch a communications risk assessment product to offer an inside and outside view of companies “in the near future, while deep integration between the two product lines will begin next year”.

The Inxight deal is due to close in July. Financial details were not disclosed.

Also at the Berlin event, Business Objects previewed its latest on-demand offering, designed “to do what iTunes did for music for the information market”, according to Breya.

Information OnDemand is designed to offer firms access to third-party financial and market data via a software-as-a-service model. Firms will be able to purchase reports from an information store hosted by Business Objects that is pre-populated with relevant information from partners such as Dun and Bradstreet.

“We’re going to amass a different bunch of sources and put together different kinds of analytics tools and pre-populated widgets to go on to employees’ desktops,” Breya said. “These will be available from an online store where you can sample the information and stream it to your desktop, or you can get a subscription for it to be delivered into your data warehouse.”

The store is set to be available worldwide by the third quarter. Firms do not have to be Business Objects customers to make use of the store, Breya added.

Business Objects also launched a Performance Suite for its enterprise performance management (EPM) product portfolio.

The release features integration between the BusinessObjects XI platform and the technology acquired from its purchase of budgeting and profitability specialist ALG Software last year. It also adds new financial performance analytics, including pre-configured connectors to SAP and Oracle.