Business Objects aims for mid-market
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Paris-based Business Objects is targeting mid-sized firms with a new business unit and BI product line.
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InfoWorld - SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies' software will take longer to achieve.
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Recent gadgets hitting the market include a portable hard drive, a multimedia player, a Bluetooth device and more.
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Also on the docket: to turn a focus on the small and midsize business sector, enterprise servers and storage, shorter design cycles for new products, and increased sales in emerging markets.
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InfoWorld - IBM&#160;hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.
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SAP unveiled several products that combine its tools with those in its new Business Objects division.
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Online auction giant eBay won&#39;t be closing down its Half.
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A growing interest in product life-cycle management capabilities by small and midsize manufacturing companies is fueling vendor attempts to make PLM technologies easier to deploy and use.
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(InfoWorld) - 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. The suite, called BusinessObjects EPM XI, integrates products from several acquisitions the company has made over the last two years, includingÂ performance management software from Cartesis,Â ALG, andÂ SRC Software. Those products, combined with Business Object's BI and analytics software, are now integrated on top of the company's XI data-integration and visualization platform. All told, the new product allows CFOs to see and share data from various business analysis and EPM applications -- such as enterprise reporting, scorecarding, sales and budgeting information -- in one software suite, said Marge Breya, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Business Objects on a conference call Wednesday. Business Objects, which has headquarters in Paris and San Jose, California, remains one of the only BI pure plays still standing, and the company shows little sign of slowing down amid heightened competition. The company moved into the fast-growing EPM space a couple of years ago to keep up with some of its big-name competitors, which include not only traditional BI vendors like Cognos, but also more diversified applications vendors, such as Oracle and SAP. Even Microsoft plans to get deeper into the fray next month when it will expand its BI repertoire with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. However, Business Objects does not, like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, sell CRM or ERP software, and differentiates itself by positioning its software as independent and able to run on any set of enterprise applications. EPM XI is the first EPM suite to include profitability analytics, and its ability to make so much analysis and performance information available to financial decision-makers in every part of the enterprise differentiates it from competitors, said Trevor Walker, vice president of product marketing. The suite also includes new software to automate and speed up the process of closing out financial transactions, which is called "the close" and a particular pain point for CFOs, he said. More information about EPM XI can be found on Business Objects' Web site. The software is expected to be generally available on Sept. 30
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Ziff Davis - Despite significant RFID adoption from the biggest companies, IBM is turning its attention to the midmarket.
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IBMÂ hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.
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Enterprise Products Partners builds for the future.
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New wares include consumer printers, office printers for small businesses and Web sites to help customers become more creative.
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With consolidation at a fever pitch in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, it would be understandable if MicroStrategy customers felt nervous, given that the vendor remains as one of the market&#39;s few independents.After all,&#160;Business Objects now has the support of new parent company SAP, thanks to a $6.7 billion acquisition, while&#160;Hyperion is now part of Oracle, which spent $3.3 billion to buy it. Meanwhile,&#160;IBM is expected to soon finalize its $5 billion purchase of Cognos.Yet, MicroStrategy customers interviewed at the company&#39;s MicroStrategy World 2008 conference in Miami expressed confidence in the vendor and said its independent status gives it certain advantages over Business Objects, SAP, and Cognos.In particular, several customers said they like that MicroStrategy will remain free of pressures stemming from having to prioritize supporting complementary products from a parent company and, conversely, diluting support for similar products from competing companies.Lindsey Aubuchon, MIS director at W.E. Aubuchon, which operates hardware stores in New England, said her company likes to have flexibility to mix and match IT products as it sees fit, creating multi-vendor environments to achieve its desired implementations. &quot;My company likes to have openness to choose what they want,&quot; said Aubuchon, whose employer has been a MicroStrategy customer for about seven years.Consequently, she nodded in agreement when MicroStrategy&#39;s CEO Michael Saylor said in his keynote at the event that the vendor strives to be agnostic and neutral with respect to making its products work with complementary wares from other vendors.&quot;Our view is to be Switzerland in this business, and to make sure we protect your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors and technology architectures to achieve your goal,&quot; Saylor said.He predicted that Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion will see their product roadmaps re-routed based on competitive considerations handed down by their new parent companies.As an independent, MicroStrategy will continue to support a wide variety of complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems, processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers and on market dynamics, Saylor said. &quot;The market needs a vendor that provides the flexibility we can provide,&quot; he said.Phillip Julian, sales operations and senior data management analyst at Inspire Pharmaceuticals in Durham, North Carolina, is all for product agnosticism and flexibility in IT vendors. The company recently acquired the MicroStrategy software to generate better, more interactive and visually appealing reports, he said. Until now, Inspire had been analyzing data with SAS Institute data-mining software and creating reports with Microsoft&#39;s Excel.&quot;We&#39;re doing it so we get into really good technology that would help us grow,&quot; Julian said. &quot;I want to move us into another generation [of reporting software] where we&#39;re looking at something that&#39;s more graphical, more visual. We need to have something that the VP of sales and the sales force can understand.&quot;Similar expectations led Robeks, a chain of fruit juice establishments, to make a hefty investment in the MicroStrategy platform, which it is in the process of implementing. With most of its presence in the U.S. West Coast, Manhattan Beach, California-based Robeks is looking to grow significantly in other parts of the U.S. and the world in the coming years, and, to support those efforts, it needs better reporting and analysis tools than the in-house ones it currently uses.&quot;Being able to analyze [sales and marketing] data more accurately will help us grow the business. We&#39;re in a very quick growth mode right now,&quot; said IS Director Pete Carvajal.As a new customer, he was interested in hearing Saylor address the recent wave of market consolidation to find out what MicroStrategy&#39;s position is. &quot;Them emphasizing that they&#39;re one of the players in the market that&#39;s not in the middle of all the turmoil of all the consolidation was good to hear and to understand what the future is,&quot; he said.&quot;It&#39;s important for them to come out and indicate the whys and whens of their business model moving forward. This is a huge investment for my company, and the last thing I want to do is spend all this time and money in an application that gets absorbed by a bigger company and maybe disappears,&quot; Carvajal said.
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Dynamics family of business applications are refined for specific industries.
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Company hopes to lure QuickBooks users to its revamped small business app.
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This week ObjectStore, a provider of technology designed to manage massive amounts of data in real time, will unveil RFID Accelerator. The company aims to give to supply chain capabilities similar to those used by financial institutions for executing programmatic trades on the stock exchange.Â