Business Objects Rolls Out Integrated CPM, Acquires Text Analytics, and Previews On-Demand BI-Integrated Commercial Data

| May 29, 2007 | Data Management | Competitive Intelligence Report

| Analyst: James Kobielus

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: High

Event Summary

On May 22nd Business Objects announced the new BusinessObjects EPM Performance Suite, which integrates the former ALG Software’s cost and profitability analysis offerings onto the BusinessObjects XI platform, introduces new financial analytics features, provides new visualization and data integration capabilities in financial planning, and will be generally available on June 7. Separately, Business Objects announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Inxight Software, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics, federated search, and data visualization. Also, Business Objects announced that it will soon start beta-testing a forthcoming Information OnDemand software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, under which it will make external market information available to customers in business intelligence (BI)-ready format, directly from within their BI solution.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Business Objects’ launch of its integrated corporate performance management (CPM) product platform/suite, its agreement to acquire text analytics/mining vendor Inxight, and its preview of an on-demand subscription service under which it will make external market information available to customers in business intelligence (BI)-ready format. These are just the latest in a steady stream of bold announcements by Business Objects to strengthen its BI market leadership through strategic acquisitions, product launches, feature enhancements, partnerships, and other initiatives that span most of its best-of-breed solution set.

• Vendor Importance: High to Business Objects, because the vendor needs these bold moves to continue diversification into growth markets—such as CPM, text analytics, and on-demand business content--that leverage its BI product family and position it for further revenue and profit growth in a competitive environment in which core BI features are becoming commoditized through software as a service (SaaS), open source software, and other trends.

• Market Impact: High on the BI/CPM market, because Business Objects is rapidly evolving its core product family to maintain its market leadership, stay in the forefront of industry innovation, and fend off determined assaults by aggressive competitors such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Cognos.

Recommended Competitor Actions

• Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft must aggressively cross-sell their growing CPM product families into their respective packaged-application customer bases, positioning Business Objects’ analytic solutions as redundant with the functionality that customers already access in their existing ERP applications, and also with the ERP vendors’ own CPM offerings that extend customer investments in those applications.

• CPM vendors should accelerate development of consolidated families of BI-integrated analytic applications. Oracle and SAP must converge CPM solutions from Hyperion and Outlooksoft, respectively, into their existing CPM and BI platforms. Cognos and SAS must continue to enhance their respective BI and DI offerings, while tightening integration with their own CPM applications. And Microsoft must simply deliver its first BI-integrated CPM platform in order to be considered a credible player in this emerging market.

• CPM rivals must continue to make fill-in acquisitions and engage their partner ecosystems in order to offer a broad variety of targeted horizontal and vertical applications. By the end of this decade, any CPM vendor whose offerings are purely focused on the CFO, or that fails to provide an extensible, BI-integrated CPM product portfolio for HR, sales/marketing, manufacturing, retailing, and other key customer segments will be a non-starter in this segment.

• BI rivals should acquire and/or merge with text-analytics vendors to fill out their product portfolios and compete head-on with Business Objects, IBM, Oracle, SAS, SPSS, and others in this growing niche. BI vendors that currently lack text analytics include Cognos, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Microsoft, SAP, and Actuate. Promising acquisition candidates in the text analytics arena include Attensity, Clearforest, Clarabridge, Factiva, Nstein, and Teragram.

• BI rivals should beef up their support for integration of third-party commercial business data into their reports, dashboards, scorecards, and other tools. To that end, vendors that already provide access to third-party enrichment data in conjunction with their DI/DQ offerings (e.g., IBM, SAS) should leverage these content relationships into their BI tools. BI vendors that lack such existing content partnerships should partner with DQ vendors that already offer them—especially, SAS/DataFlux, Pitney Bowes Group 1, and Harte-Hanks Trillium Software.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• Existing Business Objects customers should recognize that these latest announcements improve the vendor’s positioning in selected areas that may or may not address their specific enterprise requirements. The vendor has strengthened its CPM products’ integration with the XI platform, while also adding a text analytics/mining vendor and still-in-beta access to BI-integrated third-party commercial data sources.

• Existing Business Objects CPM customers should ask the vendor to publish, as soon as the Cartesis acquisition is complete, a concrete roadmap for integration of that vendor’s products into the new BusinessObjects EPM Performance Suite and, through that suite, into the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI and BusinessObjects Crystal Decisions BI platforms. The roadmap must spell out the migration, support, and (if applicable) end-of-life plans for users of legacy Cartesis products.

• Existing Business Objects BI customers should ask the vendor to publish, as soon as the Inxight acquisition is complete, a roadmap for integrating the acquired text analytics/mining, federated search, and visualization technologies into its XI and Crystal Decisions platforms. The roadmap must spell out the migration, support, and (if applicable) end-of-life plans for users of legacy Inxight products.

• Existing users of Business Objects’ premises-based and SaaS-based BI solutions should participate in the forthcoming beta testing of the Information OnDemand offering. To the extent that this near-future on-demand offering will help customers to enrich their BI reports, dashboards, and other views with actionable commercial content in a way that is more cost-effective than acquiring and integrating the same content themselves, organizations should sign up for the service when it becomes generally available later this year.

• Existing ISVs, VARs, and other Business Objects channel partners should seize on these latest announcements as ample demonstration of the vendor’s commitment to helping them target hot new growth markets. They should work closely with the vendor to explore how they can best position Business Objects’ CPM, text analytics/mining, and on-demand offerings into large and midmarket customer accounts.

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