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SAP & Business Objects - A Partner Perspective

by: Thomas Meers, President & Principal Consultant

By now you have likely heard that SAP, the third largest software company in the world, has acquired Business Objects. The acquisition is complete and the process of combining these companies is well along even though Business Objects will remain a separate entity. Many of our customers and associates have asked how we at Result Data feel about this turn of events so I thought it may helpful to provide a short newsletter article offering our perspective.

To start you should know that aside from our expertise and focus on Business Intelligence, Result Data has a long history of business systems development including the creation and deployment of several custom accounting and financial systems. For this reason we are somewhat familiar with SAP and its associated dominance in the ERP marketplace. We have also recently been approved to offer the SAP Business One ERP and CRM software for small to medium sized businesses. Our first direct experience with SAP was through the partnering process for Business One which left us feeling that SAP is very well organized in the area of developing and supporting its partner community. We also quickly discovered that SAP is very serious about assuring that its partners are well trained, knowledgeable and focused. While Business Objects has been good in this area our sense is that it will improve dramatically over the next year as SAP scrutinizes business processes, internal systems and the Business Objects sales organization. We anticipate significant change in the near future and our general perception is that it will be for the best, at least from a partner perspective.

We believe that customers too will benefit from this acquisition. At the forefront of this benefit is the fact that SAP is an organization that has continually supported a variety of leading infrastructure environments making its approach consistent with that of Business Objects. We believe we’ll continue to see strong support for both Java and Dot Net platforms as well as support for a variety of the leading database technologies. It’s obvious that customers who already have SAP software will benefit from unprecedented innovation in the area of combined ERP, Data Warehousing and BI. However, because SAP has recently turned its focus to the mid-market we also feel that smaller companies will see opportunities to improve the way in which they can leverage business intelligence. SAP has developed separate ERP offerings for mid and small sized businesses and is aggressively pursuing these segments. With Business Objects technology now available for these solutions it seems that company’s ranging from a few million dollars a year in revenue to large enterprises will share the same hope for establishing a cohesive, integrated set of software that collects, manages and analyzes key business data. I know it sounds like it was read from a marketing slide, but those of us who have had to deal with the difficulties associated with back office integration and data warehousing know that the more difficult problems are always associated with correlating key data between disparate systems. Having such data organized and related with key BI components like semantics and ETL from the start suggests the time and cost to develop solutions will be radically reduced. After all in the end software is nothing more than a tool and there’s clearly an advantage to having all of the tools in the toolbox compatible with each other.

We don’t expect that SAP will take over the world given the nature of competitors like Microsoft and Oracle. However, we do think that SAP will be a great host for the leading Business Intelligence solution because BI is an extension of ERP, MRP and CRM fundamentally. Other prospective acquirers of Business Objects would have been less aligned due to their core focus on operating systems and database software, both of which play an important role yet do not fit as well from a business perspective. The fact that SAP’s success is built on providing business software that runs operations and collects operational data makes it a sensible owner for a company that organizes, manages and analyzing such data over time. We think the future is exciting and knowing that Business Objects was likely to be acquired by someone at some point did nothing to help our customers. Now that it’s done we hope to see renewed focus and commitment to providing valuable solutions and meaningful results for those we serve.

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