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Business Objects: Matching Features With Trends
By Bob Violino
Business Objects was founded in Paris in 1990 and has grown into a global business intelligence software company with about 5,400 employees, 3,000 partners and resellers, and more than 46,000 customers worldwide-including more than 80% of the Fortune 500.
The company, which has headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, was acquired for $6.8 billion in January and now operates as an independent business unit within SAP. Business Objects provides software to customers worldwide across all major industries, including financial services, retail, consumer-packaged goods, healthcare and the public sector. Some of its better known customers include General Electric, Cisco, Eli Lilly, FedEx, KeyCorp, Nissan and PepsiCo.
In addition to BI, the company provides applications in the areas of governance, risk and compliance and enterprise performance management. Given that these are all hot areas, it's not surprising that Business Objects has enjoyed steady growth. The company made a series of corporate acquisitions, including FUZZY! Informatik (data quality products), Inxight (text analytics), and Cartesis (finance and performance management) to expand the scope of its product offerings, before itself being acquired by SAP.
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Business Objects had revenue of $1.51 billion for fiscal year 2007 ended Dec. 31, 2007, up 20% from the year earlier. Net income was $53.6 million, compared with $75.4 million the year before. License revenue rose 11% to $624 million, maintenance revenue increased 28% to $636 million, and services and other revenues, including consulting and training, were up 28% to $250 million.
Shortly after the SAP acquisition, Business Objects released its latest product, Business Objects XI 3.0, an enterprise BI platform. The software includes components and features such as Xcelsius 2008, a data visualization tool designed to create interactive, shareable dashboards; Polestar, a new tool that combines search capabilities with analytical functions; and BI Widgets, a new capability that puts personalized metrics directly on user's desktops so they can monitor key performance indicators and access the most up-to-date information available.
Other features of XI 3.0 include Voyager, a data exploration tool that enables financial and business analysts to analyze business and financial performance trends; Mobile, an application for remote access to BI reports, metrics and real-time data; Live Office, which allows embedding and updating of new data in Microsoft Office Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations; and Dashboard Builder, which enables users to view all BI content together in one consolidated dashboard.
Business Objects developed the latest release of its BI software by focusing on key trends, according to Franz Aman, vice president of product marketing, business intelligence platform. One is that people can no longer make informed decisions with structured data (data that lives in a fixed field) alone because they work in teams. Another is that companies can no longer be fully vertical organizations, but need to have expertise leveraged across a supply chain.
Another clear trend is that organizations are hungry for applications that help them optimize information. Timo Elliot, senior director of strategic marketing at Business Objects, notes that the market research company Gartner reported in 2007 that BI and enterprise applications were the two top priorities for CIOs.
"In 2008, these two technologies will come together to create 'performance excellence' systems that support business optimization, not just automation-and help organizations fix the gap between strategy and execution," Elliot says. "For the first time, CIOs will have the opportunity to apply a systems approach to best-practice use of information across the organization as a whole, by synchronizing the two key components of corporate performance improvement: operational excellence and strategic change."
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