SAP's business user organization to move to Business Objects
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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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(InfoWorld) - Business Objects is stepping up its efforts in the area of corporate performance management software with an acquisition and the integration of some existing applications with its business intelligence suite. The company said on Tuesday its U.K. subsidiary has agreed to buy Armstrong Laing, which makes profitability management software, for about Â£30 million ($56 million) in cash. It expects to close the deal by the end of the year subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions. Performance management software helps big companies with sales, payroll, staffing, and capital expenditure planning. Business Objects said its license revenue from such products jumped 70 percent in the first half of the year from the same period in 2005. Armstrong, better known as ALG Software, has about 400 customers including American Express, British Airways, and Heineken, and had total revenue last year of about $19 million. Its customers use its software for profitability management, activity-based costing, and business performance measurement. Business Objects has also completed a two-year project to integrate its performance management applications with its data analytics suite, BusinessObjects XI. Many of the applications were acquired in 2005 when itÂ bought SRC SoftwareÂ for $100 million. The integration means customers can take data from the planning, budgeting and other performance management applications and combine it more easily with the reporting and analysis tools in BusinessObjects XI. The applications are aimed mostly at financial companies and finance managers at big businesses. Business Objects has dual headquarters in Paris and San Jose, California. ALG Software is a privately held company with headquarters in Atlanta and offices in Cheshire, the U.K.
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(InfoWorld) - You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy applications where all the really important data lives. With its announcement this week of ApexConnect, an integration tool to connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back in the closet and has given SaaS enterprise-level capabilities. The company said Monday that ApexConnect integration services will be built on Salesforceâs Apex programming language for multitenant applications announced last month. The new tool will allow the approximately 400 third-party applications on the companyâs AppExchange platform to work with legacy applications, Web services, and other on-demand applications. Apex uses a syntax that most Java programmers will find familiar and allows any component or application created in it to be shared with any other application on the AppExchange. The new tools include ConnectOut, an outbound messaging API that can orchestrate an event in an external system, such as SAP, based on a trigger event in Saleforce.com, said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce. âIt has the ability to kick off a process with an SAP or Oracle system,â Collins said. Another ApexConnect tool, ConnectOracle, will give IT the capability to connect to any Oracle back office system to synchronize data between Salesforceâs CRM application and Oracleâs ERP systems, Collins said. For example, a new account in Salesforce could be automatically added to Oracleâs billing system or enable a business process such as sending out invoices or delivery notices or matching a new order against a previous discount schedule stored in a contract management system. The Apex API will also allow middleware partners including Tibco, Informatica, Web Methods, IBM and Oracle, to connect to any part of Salesforceâs on- demand system. Taken together, Salesforceâs SaaS platform, AppExchange partners, and ApexConnect show SaaS encroaching on enterprise capabilities and reaching a critical mass that will allow IT to build end-to-end system processes, said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. âOne of the main themes that runs through the history of IT is vendors and companies trying to figure out how to support business processes the way they want to run them from the very beginning to the very end,â Pombriant said. âThis is the end game.â The Apex programming language will be available in the first half of 2007 according to Salesforce officials. â[Systems integrators] have been holding back, [on SaaS] waiting to see what the next big technology shift is going to be. Announcements like this that will help them decide,â Pombriant said.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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Business Objects has released the second of three planned versions of its Crystal Decisions business intelligence software suiteÂ aimed at midmarket users.
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(InfoWorld) - In recent months, theÂ acquisition of SOA player webMethodsÂ has been the dominant news coming out of Software AG, but the middleware company also continues to hone its mainframe software and strategy. Software AG now has a CTO heading up its mainframe ETS (enterprise transaction systems) business. Joe Gentry, previously ETS senior vice president, has recently taken on the additional responsibility of steering development of new versions of the vendor's Adabas database and Natural programming language. Historically, Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich had overseen mainframe software development, but he has plenty on his plate particularly now that the vendor has closed its $546 million purchase of webMethods. Software AG closed the acquisition on June 1 and is nowÂ working on integrating its SOA tools with those of webMethods. The company feels that having a CTO will have send an important message to customers and the market that Software AG is looking at ways to innovate and take technology leadership with its software. Gentry divides his time equally between the U.S. and Europe (Software AG has its main headquarters in Germany). Last month, enterprise applications vendorÂ SAP AG announced the appointment of its first CTOÂ as a way to lay out a clear road map for the company's products and speak to particular areas of new development alongside ongoing software rollouts. In February of last year, Software AG announced new releases of its mainframe products -- Adabas 2006 and Natural 2006 -- centered around support for SOA development and Web services. The next versions of the products could appear within 18 months to two years, Gentry said, because Software AG operates on a release cycle for new software every two to three years. The next version of Adabas is likely to focus on ways to handle unstructured data, such as online information, as well as provide better Google-like search optimization, he added. Data archiving is also becoming more critical with Software AG anticipating that the amount of information stored in mainframe archives will double over the next few years. Another key goal for a new release of Adabas will be meeting the needs of so-called extreme transaction processing applications, which place heavy demands on databases and include credit-card processing and gaming applications. Software AG intends to continue its push around support for open-source technology, planning to add AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML)Â capability to the Natural application development platform with the first implementation out by the end of the third quarter. The vendor already provides an Eclipse interface for Natural and is a member both of the Eclipse Foundation and of the OpenAjax Alliance consortia. Software AG will also do more to integrate its newly acquired webMethods technology with both Adabas and Natural so users can generate Web services using the mainframe software, which then can be called by the webMethods products. IBM is Software AG's main mainframe software competitor. At the same time, the vendor enjoys a strong relationship with IBM's mainframe hardware division. Gentry doesn't see a need for Software AG to acquire additional mainframe technology, but the vendor is taking a look at several companies where an acquisition would yield an additional customer base. Those users would then potentially end up moving over to Adabas and Natural. Software AG is also keen to continue to grow on a geographic basis, having recently established its own operations in both Israel and Japan. "Next year, we move into Brazil and Latin America," Gentry said. One method of expanding is by acquiring the existing distributor for the vendor's software in a given location, which was the case in Israel, he added.
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German business software vendor SAP AG released a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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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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(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, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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Will 'coding in the large' replace what we do now? Over the last few columns we have looked at how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based systems can be built using the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO).â¦
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Borland with its Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) plan is looking to enable users to manage software projects like a business, Borlandâs Boz Elloy, senior vice president of software products, told attendees at the BorCon conference here on Monday.
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Smart ERP+CRM solution for Small-Medium Enterprises in the global marketplace covering all areas from customer management, supply chain and accounting. For $2-200M revenue companies looking for "brick and click" first tier functionality.  Compiere released its newest Production Release 2.5.1f !  The emphasis of this release was the improved Server infrastructure.  You can now monitor the (accounting, request, workflow, alert) processors and their logs from the web. The default URL is http://localhost/compiereMonitor and requires to log on with a user id with System Administrator role.  New are also Alerts - you define the situation you want to be alerted of and Compiere will send an email with details, if the conditions are met.  Document Value based Workflows allow you to start a workflow automatically, if a certain condition is met in any Entity in the system. You can use this for example to do a credit check for new Business Partners or when the address was changed.  Together with the Document Process Workflows and Alerts, you can now model all Business Processes.  Due to Server Infrastructure changes, you need to - Delete the jboss sub-directory Before upgrading (extracting the zip/gz) - After upgrading, you need to define Accounting and Request Processors for your clients. They are created automatically if you create a new client, but not for existing ones.  If you have a translated system, you should run "Synchronize Terminology" after migration or after importing the translation.   The Toronto training was quickly fully booked.  Note that the next intensive training "from the source" is December 6-10 in Miami, FL ... and book early if you want to guarantee your seat.  You can find the latest release here:  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29057
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Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, describes the company's software-as-a-service approach.
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Users on hand for this week's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference say a move to SOA can yield substantial rewards -- after a company has first navigated the problems such a move can uncover.