It's good to be reminded that it's far from a winner-take-all kind of world.

With a few hours to kill before my flight took off from Fort Lauderdale this afternoon, I parked myself next to a winsome-looking blond because ... well, why not.

But what next caught my eye is that she was reading eWEEK. Now how often does that happen?

I couldn't resist the opportunity of quizzing her: Which articles caught her attention? What's top of mind for her?

Top of mind for this reader: business intelligence and search.

This person, the vice president of IT for a large educational institution in South Florida, told me her organization is stripping out old Novell Netware and Groupwise applications and replacing it with Microsoft SharePoint, Outlook and the like. Why? Novell doesn't offer enough integration with other apps, notably in search.

The organization bought a BI application two years ago and is looking to do more with it (and which is, incidentally, the purpose of her trip to Cary, N.C., where SAS is hosting a two-day user conference).

So chalk one up for Microsoft.

But by the same token, she said, her organization uses an open source-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) system and is being asked by its board of trustees to move further toward open-source platforms. "We can save a lot of money by moving away from proprietary software," she told me.

So chalk one up for the other guys.

She had to dash for her plane, or I would have asked her why she didn't opt for an open source-based BI application. Was she worried that owning Microsoft and SharePoint would lock her into a proprietary cycle forever? She took my card, and I'm hoping she'll call. Maybe she'll comment on this blog.

But I suspect the answer is simply that she's not particularly religious on the issue of open source; she's just opting for the most cost-effective solution she can get at any given moment. Customer lock-in? The freedom of open source? She'll leave those debates to others.

And she's not alone, of course. Which means vendors should do more than pay lip service to "heterogeneous environments" (which is their arm's-length way of saying, "unfortunately, some customers have that other stuff too"), and customers should feel comfortable insisting that they do so.

Because until all these disparate systems can talk to each other effectively, customers will struggle to realize the holy grail of business intelligence shared across the enterprise for competitive advantage.