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October 17, 2002

Business Objects Going Enterprise

Future products and customer issues highlight Conference

by Mark Smith

At the Business Objects International User Conference this week, Business Objects was beating its drum to more than a 1,000 attendees about its upcoming products and plans for the business intelligence (BI) market. With a history of profitability, a war chest of more than $300 million in cash, and a strong portfolio of customers, Business Objects is well prepared to endure the current economy and take the lead as a strategic supplier of BI. In fact, the company outlined how it plans to accomplish its goal of becoming a $1-billion company in three years with more insight into a broad set of its upcoming products.

For the first time, Business Objects communicated a vision that begins to demonstrate its ability to transform the way the enterprise uses BI. This new approach lets organizations more effectively synchronize information and collaborate to drive actions and decisions in the organization. This step moves beyond traditional functional-centric decision support approaches (query, reporting, and analysis) for getting organizations to broadly deploy and leverage information effectively. Business Objects also described how recently acquired Acta Technology is a critical component of its platform and analytic applications direction.

Innovation

Business Objects also publicly unveiled its Sundance project, available in 2003, which transitions a new class of functionality into the BusinessObjects product suite. This project focuses on new capabilities for leveraging corporate semantics, collaboration, knowledge discovery, and action-focused workflow called "information practices." Over the last year, vendors such as Cognos Inc. Informatica Corp, and MicroStrategy Inc. have also introduced workflow concepts into their new and updated BI products. This industry effort will begin to bridge the gap between the strategic and tactical decision-making levels in organizations. However, more understanding is still required to bridge to the operational and business-process levels.

The concept of newsgroups that Lotus Notes introduced more than a decade ago and Netscape standardized across the Internet has finally arrived in BI. This idea will be part of Sundance as Business Objects has built its own discussion groups for collaboration on metrics and goals. Unfortunately, it isn't using any industry collaboration products (Microsoft or IBM/Lotus Notes) and the capability is only worthwhile if Business Objects is your enterprise BI provider. This concept is extremely important and will eliminate the traditional pitfalls in your organization you encounter when taking action and making decisions during time lags between meetings and disconnected emails threads.

Room for Improvement

The greatest challenges that I hear from customers aren't about end user functionality but the required IT focus on managing large centralized user deployments. Instead of directly addressing the user performance and scalability issues in accessing growing volumes of data, a deliberate shift is occurring to new products and enhancements. This transition is troubling for customers who have specific requests for addressing the efficiency of using existing products. The key to building a great BI solution is having a platform and architecture that provides IT with the mechanism to drive user self-sufficiency in enterprise deployments. This capability will be critical for Business Objects to address.

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The manageability, performance, scalability issues were spawned out of the parallel architectures of BusinessObjects 5i and WebIntelligence, which have significant interoperability challenges. These issues are being addressed next year in WebIntelligence's next major release, which will deliver a completely rewritten version of the product. This correction is critical as many major customers have not been able to fully deploy WebIntelligence; instead, they've deployed the 5i Web browser plug-in. This release will be a major milestone as this product is a key piece of Business Objects' overall product strategy in supporting the downstream application foundation and analytics application suite. Customers are keeping their fingers crossed that it will address their deployment and management pain.

Observations

Business Objects is in the race to become a leader in the BI market and make BI a strategic application and focus for organizations. It is just beginning to evolve beyond its query and reporting roots to provide a performance measurement platform and solution. Business Objects is just beginning to understand the requirements of performance management — a decision-cycle process with capabilities (that is, what-if, planning and alignment to business processes) that will keep it busy for years to come. Business Objects will need to directly address how it will evolve its platform and architecture to help organizations manage BI at all levels and further help IT demand for managing total cost of ownership. The next year will be the most trying for the company with new management (development, product marketing, human resources, professional services, and operations) along with new and critical updates to existing products.

First Industry Research on BI and Business Processes

Want to voice how you look to apply business intelligence in your organization at the operational level and plan to measure and monitor business processes? Participate in this research survey and get a report on what organizations are doing to address this evolving market.

Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is a principal and founder of Full Circle Strategies, a business strategy services firm focused on providing insight into the performance management market.