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October 8, 2007

SAP to Buy Business Objects!

This morning, it was announced that SAP intends to buy Business Objects for the equivalent of $6.8 billion. While Business Objects will initially be run as a wholly-owned subsidiary, I can certainly see the value of Business Objects software being added to the SAP ERP - especially the portal, the OLAP tool and the data quality tool. SAP software eventually could be reshaped by this acquisition, not only the ERP, but also the Business Warehouse.

Furthermore there’s the competitive play into the Oracle/Business Objects accounts. As Ken Rudin, CEO of LucidEra, commented: “Business Objects is installed in a lot of Oracle accounts, and the implementations are being managed by the IT groups. These are the same people that SAP wants to talk to about putting in SAP's other applications, so it gives SAP an introduction into a large base of accounts currently controlled by Oracle.”

The business intelligence market continues to be absorbed into enterprise software lines. Business Objects was one of the last large standalone business intelligence companies. Enterprise software players now seek an end-to-end story and eventually so will end clients. I’ve talked a lot about “BI Frameworks” – those handful of companies that sell a complete BI story. Maybe we should be talking about enterprise frameworks like those from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM. If HP did not make moves here beyond NeoView, I would be surprised.

Informatica didn’t need to rush into this, assuming they were even considered by SAP. They are still selling data integration as a standalone and doing it quite well, thank you very much. However, as potential suitors go away one-by-one, long-term, they may need a path into a framework.

Teradata, freshly minted as its own company last month, continues with a “data warehousing is different and necessitates its own consideration” strategy. How long will this serve them? Also there’s Cognos, who, while having less depth than Business Objects, surely was considered in this. And, finally, they may be easy to forget on the financial stage since they are private (albeit one of the largest private companies in the world), but SAS could be a buyer or seller. And welcome to the big time Netezza. What will the eventual NeoView story and the black-box purchasing that will sweep the industry (i.e., Oracle now doing an appliance model) – mean? Are appliances being bought for superior performance, or for the purchasing model? For Netezza’s sake, let’s hope it’s the performance.

So, I’m not rushing into calling this a BI purchase. Rather, they’re now enterprise purchases and further validate the transition of business intelligence from post-operational to operationally embedded in the enterprise.

Technorati tags: Business intelligence, Business Objects, SAP

Posted by William McKnight at 1:36 PM | | Comments (0)

June 8, 2007

Jury finds Business Objects guilty; words with Informatica continue

$25M was awarded to Informatica last week based on technology infringement in Data Integrator, but the debate between the 2 companies continues over the post-award rhetoric. This article from CRN Australia sums it up.

It remains to be negotiated how much the Data Integrator pathing forward will be affected by this.

Technorati tags: Informatica, Data Integration, Business Objects

Posted by William McKnight at 9:52 AM | | Comments (0)

February 9, 2006

Business Objects buys Firstlogic

As announced yesterday, Business Objects has entered into a purchase agreement for data quality solutions provider Firstlogic for $69 million - all cash.

That Firstlogic would be bought soon is not surprising since they had recently announced, though not consumated, intent to be purchased by Pitney-Bowes. Surely they will thrive more within business intelligence with Business Objects as their suitor. The move is not surprising on another front, and that is the overall consolidation trend of the business intelligence industry.

What is does signal is that the "big 3" of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are not doing all of the purchasing and that even BI-centric players like Business Objects (and Informatica with their recent purchase of Similarity Systems) are still growing their businesses through acquisition. Although other BI acquistions are probably not complete for 2006 (Informatica? Microstrategy?), this recent trend will keep a thriving, competitive (and non-standardized) BI market in place for years to come.

As well, data quality is becoming so true a component of business intelligence, that it is well regarded as a member of the standard stack alongside ETL, DBMS and data access.

Posted by William McKnight at 3:23 PM | | Comments (0)

October 30, 2005

Business Objects Passes the Billion Dollar Revenue Milestone

I have been referring to Business Objects over the past year as a company "nearing" the billion dollar mark in annual revenue. Now, according to this press release by B.O., I can drop the "nearing" since B.O. is recording $1.039 billion in trailing twelve month revenue for the quarter ending September 30, 2005.

Continue reading "Business Objects Passes the Billion Dollar Revenue Milestone" »

Posted by William McKnight at 8:22 PM | | Comments (0)

September 7, 2005

Business Objects in Business Week online

There is a nice high-level overview of business intelligence in this interview in Business Week online with Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud. It's always interesting to see how the major press picks up business intelligence issues as it is doing more and more these days.

This article brings to mind a couple of points. One is about industry consolidation. We have only seen the beginning of business intelligence consolidation. I believe Hyperion, Microstrategy, Cognos, Informatica and yes, Business Objects are in play to the current and future industry titans.

I don't see a mad rush for this consolidation to happen however. These companies are doing quite well and Hyperion, Informatica and Business Objects have recently (past 2 years) created full lifecycle stories of their own. BI is already big enough to support at least one $1B company (Business Objects.)

Continue reading "Business Objects in Business Week online" »

Posted by William McKnight at 5:58 PM | | Comments (1)