Business Objects rises on talk of software mergers
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Shares in Business Objects (BOBJ.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) rallied on Monday as analysts pointed to the French-American company as an obvious takeover target in a consolidating software sector.
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The ObjectWeb Consortium added portal, content, and business process management elements to the stack of open source middleware projects it promotes, potentially providing businesses with access to cheaper technology, members of the group announced Tuesday.
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IBM and Borland have both upgraded their development platforms to focus more on business process automation.
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The companyâs acquisitions in growth platforms mean more technologies to tap into for use in its other businesses.
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Rumors are swirling that the companies will join forces in storage. It makes more sense than the alternatives, observers say.
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(InfoWorld) - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications. The service allows customers to use Business Objects' BI tools without having to maintain the software themselves or buy extra servers on which to run it. Business Objects maintains a copy of each customer's data in its own data centers, and employees access the data and BI applications through a Web browser. Business Objects took itsÂ first steps in on-demand softwareÂ last April with the release of crystalreports.com, for sharing reports online. That service has attracted about 50,000 customers, the company said. The new service announced Monday, called Intelligence OnDemand, includes a broader set of applications for formatted reporting, running ad hoc queries and analysis, and displaying BI "dashboards" on a user's desktop. The first version of the service, available now, is for customers who have data stored in Salesforce.com's online CRM applications. Business Objects will load a copy of the customer's Salesforce data to its own data centers and build a data warehouse that customers can use to run their BI queries. The service is aimed at sales and marketing staff and business analysts at companies with a high volume of Salesforce data, and is the first in suite of similar services that Business Objects plans to roll out, the company said. It includes on-demand versions of its Crystal Reports, Crystal Xcelsius and Web Intelligence products. Business Objects has staked outÂ an early lead in on-demand BI, although SAS Institute and some smaller BI vendors are also getting into the game. Proponents of such services say they helps customers to cut costs because they don't have to manage applications themselves or buy servers on which to run them. Business Objects said it's new service will take the "heavy lifting" out of building and maintaining a data warehouse. The trade-off is that customers must trust a third party to look after and provide access to their sensitive company data. Business Objects representatives weren't available to give pricing for the new service, which will be unveiled at an event in California later on Monday to coincide with the start of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. Some more information is at Business Objects new On Demand Web site. The company also opened an online store on Monday where customers can buy external market information, such as sales data for other companies' products, and include it in their data analysis. The information comes from firms such as Thomson Financial, eBay, and Dun & Bradstreet. Customers can buy individual reports from $150, or sign up for a subscription. Â
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Business Objects released new software WednesdayÂ that combines EPM (enterprise performance management), BI, and data integration into a comprehensive suite aimed at CFOs and business finance managers.
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IBM has announced a slew of new or upgraded products and services aimed at helping companies better integrate business processes and make their operations more efficient through the use of service-oriented architectures.
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SAP on Tuesday gave employees a heads up that its business user organization will move over to Business Objects, a company its acquiring as part of a $6.8 billion acquisition, according to sources.
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Last November's buyout by IBM of SOA software provider Cognos is already having a major impact on businesses that use vertical market software. That impact is being felt in the way these businesses warehouse and access their data.
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Software stocks rose on Friday on  speculation there may be more mergers in the industry after a  U.S. judge allowed Oracle Corp. to proceed with its takeover of  rival PeopleSoft Inc.
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A corporate holiday shopping spree on steroids this week yielded three merger deals worth about $60 billion--including one that ranks as the largest software merger in history.
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Business Objects executives this week touted dashboard technology features and rallied support for standardization on their new business intelligence software -- two hot-button issues for users here at the company's International Users Conference.
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As mergers surge, which deals will work out?
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Shoulders its way into search tech Business Objects' stated intention of becoming a $2bn company was never going to be achieved only through organic growth, and it was inevitable that there would be a number of acquisitions along the way, of which the latest is Inxight Software.â¦
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The pioneer in pay-to-play enterprise software has seen its stock more than double since going public in August.
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A new report from Forrester Research declares that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry is over for now, though big vendors will continue to snap up smaller firms as they round out their portfolios.&quot;We do expect more consolidation to occur, but predict that the acquisitions of&#160;Business Objects by SAP,&#160;Cognos by IBM, and&#160;Oracle&#39;s renewed bid for BEA&#160;will be the last hurrahs in this cycle for super-sized acquisitions within the software industry of vendors with more than $1 billion in revenues and deal sizes of $5 billion or more,&quot; analysts R. &quot;Ray&quot; Wang and Andrew Bartels said in the report.The analysts noted that the market could see hardware vendors like Cisco make major software buys, but said such scenarios do not constitute software vendor consolidation in the traditional sense.Three major factors will staunch the flow of megadeals, they argued.Citing projections showing double-digit growth in global software revenue for 2007 and 2008, Wang and Bartels argued that vendors will not need to grow through large purchases in the immediate future, and will instead choose &quot;organic growth and spot acquisitions&quot; to satisfy shareholders.Second, the credit crunch caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown is making it harder to borrow large sums. And thirdly, there are simply fewer large ISVs to buy, the analysts noted. They identified 18 large independent software vendors that are potential targets and said many of those can be eliminated because of &quot;poor fit with strategy, financial or business questions, high price, or other considerations that stymie acquisitions.&quot;IBM will be the most aggressive with acquisitions and may go after packaged applications, a field it has largely avoided to date, according to the report.&quot;The most likely scenario involves smaller acquisitions of key ISVs building on Websphere. But if IBM makes a move for packaged apps to compete with Oracle, top apps targets could include IBM partners like Infor, IFS, Lawson, or even SAP. Industry-specific targets could include Amdocs, Deltek, and Primavera Systems,&quot; the authors state.Wang said he was comfortable making this prediction despite IBM&#39;s insistence that it has no designs on packaged applications. &quot;Last year, they spent the whole year saying they were never going to buy a BI vendor,&quot; Wang said, referring to IBM&#39;s deal to buy Cognos.As for Oracle, it will buy companies tied to middleware and vertical business applications, according Forrester. &quot;We expect Oracle to make midsize bets in key verticals like project base solutions (e.g., Computer Methods International or CMiC, Manhattan CenterStone), financial services (e.g., Temenos), retail (e.g., Escalate), and telecom, utilities, and public services (e.g., SunGard).SAP will make small purchases to flesh out NetWeaver, according to the analysts. These may include vendors of user interface tooling, master data management software and business process management products, they said, citing SAP&#39;s recent buy of Yasu Technologies, which makes a business rules engine, as evidence. &quot;Additional acquisitions could come from existing partners like AmberPoint SOA Management, F5, Magic Software Enterprises, OpenText, Savvion, and Worksoft,&quot; they added.Among the big four players, Microsoft will be &quot;the least active&quot; in terms of acquisitions, according to Forrester. &quot;Expect the Redmond giant to make selective acquisitions that do not conflict too much with its ecosystem strategy,&quot; they wrote. Possible targets include &quot;middleware solution providers like VisionWare in the customer data integration space, Riversand Technologies in the personal information manager space, and Web 2.0 specialists that enhance its Information Workplace platform.&quot;Software executives offered mixed reactions. Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP&#39;s software division, said his firm will likely continue to acquire companies, but is focused more on organic growth. Last year HP spent about 70 percent of its roughly $3.5 billion research and development budget on software, according to Hogan.&quot;That&#39;s a lot of internal R&amp;D that should ... generate commercially viable software over the next couple of years,&quot; he said. &quot;If you want to really hit the home run for shareholders, you build it yourself. When we can&#39;t build it because we don&#39;t have the DNA or the time, then we will turn to strategic M&amp;A.&quot;Executives at smaller vendors offered other takes. Informatica, a data integration vendor, is competing with the likes of IBM but enjoying strong growth, reporting this week that its 2007 revenues rose 21 percent to $391 million. CEO Sohaib Abbasi said mergers and acquisitions in the software industry should be examined beyond the size of a given deal.The pace of consolidation is much more aggressive in established categories like business applications, he noted. &quot;At the other extreme is emerging categories such as software as a service, where there is no consolidation to speak of.&quot;Informatica is doing well thanks to the relative newness of its space, he said: &quot;We are in the very early days of the data integration market. Half of our deals are uncontested.&quot;Patrick Durbin, CEO of the portfolio-management-software company Planview, said in a recent interview that his privately held firm, which has 450 customers, has &quot;critical mass&quot; and can survive as an independent.Durbin&#39;s firm partners with various companies, including Microsoft. He couldn&#39;t say for sure what would happen if it or another firm came knocking: &quot;The moment I tell you I&#39;ll never sell is the moment someone&#39;s going to back up a truck with a boatload of money.&quot;