What's even a bigger change for SAP is playing "me-too" to their competition, particularly Oracle. The notion that performance management should be pervasive within enterprise software applications has been trumpeted by the Red Empire, and SAP seems to be reacting to that message. To be fair, that strategy was first socialized by Siebel, which invested heavily integrating nQuire CRM analytics within the Siebel application, with very good results. So, while it took several years, SAP is coming around to this idea. And while I've always looked as SAP BW as an impressive feat of software engineering, it is clear that there is a market demand for user-facing tools and applications that present business information from the BW data.
The question: Was Business Objects a good choice?
- There is substantial product overlap with OutlookSoft, the last major SAP acquisition. Business Objects had moved into the Enterprise Planning space with Cartesis and SRC acquisitions, and I would assume those products won't be part of the go-forward strategy.
- Business Objects product architecture will require substantial investment to integrate into SAP. The BOBJ suite is cobbled together from Crystal, Excelsius, and legacy BOBJ products. BOBJ XI had product overlap, limited integration, and some serious functionality holes (multi-lingual reports, anyone?). Add BEx and Infocubes to the mix, and it becomes confounding for companies who don't maintain an army of experts on staff to make sense of it all.
- BOBJ itself didn't have market-leading SAP integration, so more investment will be needed there.
- SAP ended it's partnership with Crystal last year to announce a partnership with Microsoft, Duet. Now it's back, I guess.
- BOBJ tanked last quarter, and already has revised estimates downward for the upcoming quarter.
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