SAP acquire Business Objects

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With the continuing focus on acquisitions and the results reducing the BI market to only one independent player, i asked my colleague Jon Gibbs for his views. Here it is below. Do not hesitate to comment and Jon Gibbs will answer you:

With the recent news of SAP acquiring Business Objects after their previous acquisitions of Pilot Software and Outlooksoft, and hot on the heals of the Oracle acquisitions of Hyperion for its planning, budgeting and financial consolidation capabilities, we’re clearly in a period of significant Vendor consolidation in the BI space. It's going to leave a lot of people considering what this means to their BI strategy, so what do I think we can make of this activity?

Let's recap on what the true business value of business intelligence (BI) can be found in the ability to efficiently gather useful information from a diversity of both internal as well as external information sources and by exploiting this information both internally and with ecosystem partners and customers to improve mutual performance. As a result, it’s only natural that ERP vendors (historically process focused) want to widen their portfolio to include information centric capabilities, something they’ve been trying to do for a number of years, but without any significant success.

While SAP BI (Business Warehouse) have been gaining ground in the SAP customer base, Business Objects have a major focus on SAP integration with their Titan release which will potentially put pressure on other ETL products used with SAP. While there is overlap with other SAP acquisitions and products, the step change that Business Objects brings should, on balance, be good for SAP. For Business Objects, the end to the speculation regarding their future ownership should enable them to confirm their development roadmap and drive them forward.

BI/CPM vendors often have similar products built upon the same types of technology. Therefore there are little distinguishing characteristics between the various vendors. It is therefore more than likely that technology is not the driving force behind this recent storm of BI consolidation. Keeping or gaining share of this dynamic, rapidly growing and increasingly important market segment is a key driver for these vendors.

My summary? The importance of unlocking an organisation's data is finally coming of age – a sentiment further reinforced by the Teradata and SAS strategic undertaking to effectively pool resources. Where this leaves Cognos is still for debate, but there is widespread speculation that they will be next. That means a certain amount of the functionality from previously separate BI applications can and will move to being part of the larger Enterprise Applications suites, and this is probably an effective move.

From a technology standpoint there is a case to be made that future innovation comes from small companies focusing on niches, such as: strategy & implementation tools, meta- and master data, advanced visualization, text mining, search or business activity monitoring. The obvious point is that as these niches start to become mainstream, these too will be candidates for acquisition, may be we should consider this as an inevitable and useful long term effect that allows consolidation in our own portfolios and operations?

Posted by Andy Mulholland on October 12, 2007 | Digg this | Seed Newsvine

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Comments

# on October 16, 2007 1:48 PM, Business Research Intelligence said:

Hello Andy
I'm really enjoying this post as a business analyst and as a beginner of SAP BIW Engineer. I have a question about ERP in SAP BI. How to integrate future business objects in to SAP platform? Did you ever think Oracle BI suit is best when compared to SAP netweaver? If yes. How?
Regards
Arif
Business Analyst and Forex Trader

# on October 17, 2007 10:52 AM, Jonathan Ebsworth said:

There are at least two tricky questions in your post:

1. How will Business Objects solutions fit with SAP BI going forwards?

2. Is Oracle BI [ever] better than SAP NetWeaver BI?

An answer to the first question will have to wait for SAP to conclude the Business Objects deal - and then for the new business unit to confirm a new (or continuation of the old) roadmap. I have felt for some time that running multiple presentation tools on top of an SAP BI platform is something of an extravagence - I hope that one of the bi-products of this [potential] acquisition is a clearer set of options for clients - perhaps at a better price. Until the acquisition is compelete - you will have to stick with what is already available from the two vendors.

On the 'is Oracle BI ever better than NetWeaver?' question, I suppose the direct answer must be, 'It could be'. You can either look at a features and functions comparison - and there are better qualified people to answer that, than me. However, I think more normally our clients will be driven by business requirements; together with infrastructure and application strategy. If I am in an SAP-dominated application landscape, then I would expect SAP NetWeaver BI to provide the core of the BI requirements - and it would be unlikely that we would introduce Oracle BI alongside that. If the landscape is truly heterogeneous - with substantial installations of both SAP and Oracle applications and infrastructure then the decision gets more complicated ... We would use the longer-term strategy to inform the right direction for our client. I think that in most cases the NetWeaver-enabled options will be more than good enough for most general requirements.

# on October 17, 2007 12:22 PM, Jon Gibbs said:

Arif - I tend to agree with Jonathan on both points. Business Objects are/were doing a lot to integrate with SAP even before the pending acquisition. We can reasonably expect SAP to combine, converge and harmonise their product portfolio over the coming years and that will include folding in Business Objects. One area of particular interest for me will be the OEM agreement with Informatica on the ETL side and whether that can withstand the test of time - the pace and extent of change will become clearer once the acquisition is complete.

Is Oracle BI ever better than Netweaver? - I've come across no end of combinations of products that function successfully for their customers (equally I've come across under performing environments from single vendors). There are no short cuts and no substitute for good information architecture if the implementation is to prove its worth in the medium to long term. BI is a constantly moving area in organisations as every answer a BI solution gives to the business invariably raises another question. So unfortunately I agree with Jonathan -it depends..

# on October 17, 2007 1:21 PM, andy mulholland said:

What comes over to me more and more is that the detailed 'best of breed' thinking that we all were brought up to do, together with an indepth technical evaluation is becoming less and less relevant in these circumstances.

the value is less about the individual product and more about how it works in the entire suite. In theory we should get more value out of a degree of integration that would be more than could be acheived commercially on a project, and should not have the problem of ongoing support for a unique customisation.

why in theory? because my belief is that however good the product/suite is the complication has shifted from this towards how good is the person/team implementing at knowing ALL of the features to get the best for the enterprise implementation in question out of the so called 'box'.

my personal belief is that this is rising and making it more challenging to find the people able to handle the topic.

# on October 23, 2007 1:01 PM, Business Research Intelligence said:

Thnaks to Mr Andy and Jonathan! Now i can conclude which is suitable for homo and hetrogenorous environment. I can say SAP BI is more easy to compared Oracle's BI suite as per my knowledge.
Thanks for your response

Kind regards
Arif

# on October 23, 2007 1:09 PM, Thirulogachander said:

Hi Arif

You have raised very good question, which will benefit the BI communities , you can share your thoughts on this also.

# on December 27, 2007 6:10 AM, Amanmeet Mehta said:

Hi,

Is Capgemini working on Outlooksoft projects?

Regards,
Aman