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Blog: David Loshin

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SAP and Business Objects

I got a press release yesterday announcing SAP's acquisition of Business Objects. Clearly, what had been a series of successive acquisitons of componentry in the BI space is appearing to be a successful business strategy in terms of market capitalization and establishing value in the process of "gussying up" for the big wedding. What is interesting about SAP's acquisition of BOBJ is that SAP's previous acquisitons have tended to be on a lower scale, giving the impression that they were less interested in a purchase of this scale in terms of a technology capture. However, this appears to be a nice fit, especially as business performance and productivity emerges as the next hot spot in the BI space.

Incorporating the BOBJ suite with SAP's offerings provides a path for their transition away from the "monolithic" approach and a little more towards democratization; BOBJ's own previous purchases include ETL (Acta), data quality (FirstLogic), and reporting/delivery (Crystal) will add a distinctive layer to SAP's existing software prominence.

  Posted by David Loshin on October 8, 2007 5:47 AM |

Comments

And don't forget BOBJ's localized central europe acquisition of Gartner's Magic Quadrant Data Quality Challenger FUZZY! Informatik AG that gives BOBJ a world wide portfolio of data quality solutions and a Data Quality Competence Center inside the SAP homeland Germany!

Posted by: Niels Weigel | October 9, 2007 2:35 PM

I have been specializing in integrating Crystal Reports with SAP BW for the past five years. Bottom line: when implemented correctly, it's a terrific solution for the business end user. It requires a savvy analyst or IT developer to create the content and publish it to the web, but the tool is much more robust and easier to work with than the BI tools provided by SAP. But then, of course, that's one reason why SAP bought Business Objects. Once the dust settles on this there are going to be a lot of happy end users out there.

Posted by: Mike Garrett | January 17, 2008 12:46 AM

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