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Perspective on the SAP Acquisition of Business Objects
Author: Jatin Shah, Datamatics Ltd.
SAP recently announced its plans to acquire Business Objects for $6.8 Billion. BI-Group
has closely followed this announcement & would like to share the perspectives on the
impact of this acquisition on the BI market.
This acquisition is a continuation of a shakeout process in the BI market space.
Although Business Objects has grown to considerable size through a long series of
acquisitions, the acquisitions have masked some fundamental weaknesses in its
technology offerings. Business Objects’ BI products are fragmented, lacking both
scalability and integration, making them inappropriate for many applications in the
new generation of enterprise BI.
It is believed that Business Objects needed and was so eager to be acquired because it had accumulated a
large collection of non-integrated technologies in a market where organic technical integration is
essential for providing enterprise BI solutions.
SAP rushed into the purchase of Business Objects and paid a premium price, even though Business
Objects warned that Q3 revenues and earnings would be well below Wall Street estimates. One must
wonder whether the acquisition was a defensive move by SAP to prevent a competitor from acquiring
Business Objects.
Unless SAP maintains Business Objects purely as a portfolio investment, it is likely that Business
Objects’ architecture will change to improve integration with the SAP suite & that the customers will be
forced to undergo even more major migrations.
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Perspective on the SAP Acquisition of Business Objects | BI Blog | Business Intelligence ... Page 2 of 5
As SAP influences the Business Objects’ product set to be more aligned with the needs of the SAP BI
architecture, the architecture and design priorities of Business Objects’ products & technology will
become even less applicable and likely move away from data warehousing.
There is significant overlap within SAP and Business Objects’ technologies and product suites.
Customers with products that are undergoing integration will face painful migrations. Customers with
products that are not being integrated face the likelihood that SAP will slow down development on those
products, and ultimately end them.
Few of the significant areas of product overlap between Business Objects and SAP are as follows:
Product Category Business Objects SAP
Xcelsius,
Visual Composer,
Dashboards and Scorecards Dashboard Manager,
Web Application Designer
Crystal Vision
Web Intelligence,
BEx Web Analyzer,
OLAP Intelligence, Voyager,
Query, Analysis and Reporting BEx Analyzer, ABAP™,
Crystal Reports, Cartesis,
BEx Report Designer, Pilot
Inxight Software
Office Plug-ins Live Office BEx Analyzer
Nsite (on demand), crystalreports.com NetWeaver xApps
Application Infrastructure
Vertical and Horizontal Apps Vertical and Horizontal Apps
Desktop Design Tools Desktop Intelligence, Designer BEx Query Designer
Portals InfoView SAP NetWeaver Portal
SEM-BCS, BPS,
Netweaver® BI-Integrated Planning,
Performance Management or
SRC, ALG Software, Cartesis OutlookSoft,
CPM
Netweaver® BI Advanced Planner and Optimizer,
mySAP ERP Express Planning
Master Data Management Metadata Manager, Composer SAP NetWeaver® Master Data Management
Data Integrator (Acta),
Data Federator (Medience),
ETL/EII/EIM Data Extraction routines to populate SAP BI
Data Quality (Firstlogic, FUZZY!
Informatik)
Mobile Interactive Viewing
Mobile SAP NetWeaver® Mobile
(InfoView Mobile)
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Posted on January 22nd, 2008 by Jatin Shah
Filed under: Business Intelligence | Edit
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