Many organizations rely on up-to date data analysis and reporting mechanism and organization's stake holder discuss latest sales figures and inventory report and side by side they usually compare these figures planned statistics versus actual statistics and performance and look into what is going wrong with which department. At some point in time you need to extract data from data warehouse to represent and analyze data you can do it using sql server business intelligence development studio
If your data is stored in IBM DB2 and AS400 data servers, then you may face some performance issue or delays in processing of this kind of heterogeneous data chunk. And your transaction data log may not be seen easily in data warehouse and there are database column and row limitations on AS/400 so you could keep limited data to process.
On the other hand if you have to deal with heterogeneous type of data and you want fast processing in terms of analyzing of report based on intelligence so you can do sales forecasting and other decision making activities based on this huge data.
You can easily deal with heterogeneous type of data in less time if you are working sql server 2008 and its reporting services including SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio.
If you have sql server 2008 enterprise database software, and sql server 2008 reporting services and sql server fast track data warehouse. Then that is all for that kind of operation that took more time to process heterogeneous data from diversified data bases. And if you are using Excel Services and sharepoint/performance point services/server.
"There is no comparison between any software giant- these facts are just for information purpose and analysis only"