BOSTON — Just eight months after being acquired by SAP, Business Objects drew attention to its goal of a combined ERP/BI portfolio by announcing several new additions that deliver on the enterprise performance management (EPM) strategy outlined by the duo back in January.

At the Business Objects Influencer Summit here this week, executives took the stage to explain how coupling SAP’s enterprise applications with business intelligence tools that provide insight into how processes are working will close the gap between corporate strategy and operational execution — a key capability in a fast-paced, global market.

To that end, the company introduced new functionality within its EPM applications, including tighter integration with the Business Objects BI platform and SAP’s NetWeaver technology. The new applications, including SAP Spend Analytics 2.0, SAP Strategy Management 7.0, BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management 7.0, BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation, and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, have been designed to move beyond the finance department to optimize business performance across an entire network, the company said.

More important, according to the company, the SAP and Business Objects integration is unifying ERP, EPM, BI, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technologies, four areas that have been distinct disciplines until now.

Prior to the SAP acquisition, Business Objects had BI capabilities and had invested in EPM for strategy management planning and spend analysis, but it did not have GRC applications, which cover risk management, access and process control, global trade services, and environmental health and safety.

The integration of GRC was part of BusinessObjects’ vision prior to the SAP acquisition, “as we started to look at GRC for an end-to-end solution that would allow a customer to connect strategy and execution,” said Franz Aman, vice president of Business Objects’ Business Intelligence Platform product marketing. “After the SAP [deal], we put our assets together and made decisions quickly around our strategy for the [larger product] portfolio,” he told Manufacturing Executive.

A major part of SAP’s BI push going forward is to simplify the user interface so that a business user can tap into the data sources without help from the IT department. The company is also focusing on the ability to tap into unstructured data. BI, for the most part, has been about numbers, said Marge Breya, the executive vice president and general manager of Business Objects’ Business Intelligence Platform Group. Unstructured data, including e-mail, Word documents, and Web content, provides another way for companies to analyze data inside and outside of the organization, she said during a presentation.

In July 2007, Business Objects acquired text analytics provider Inxight Software, to gain that ability. And following SAP’s recent tuck-in acquisition of Analytics Inc., the company will be moving more into risk adjustment applications that pinpoint potential cost-saving opportunities or rationalize suppliers with corporate strategy and track compliance with vendor contracts, for example.

The Analytics Inc., technology is showing up for first time in the SAP Spend Analytics application.

The applications SAP announced this week include:

• SAP Spend Analytics, an all-new EPM offering that automatically aggregates, cleanses, and analyzes procurement data from across enterprise systems as well as from third-party vendors.

• SAP Strategy Management, which enables companies to define business strategy and disseminate business goals throughout the organization, making employees more engaged in achieving business success. The new version is integrated with SAP GRC Risk Management, providing a single, combined process to define business strategy while taking into account risk factors, including financial risk and corporate governance policies.

• SAP Business Planning and Consolidation unites planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting in a single, user-friendly application. The new release allows easy configuration, according to SAP, and is optimized for Microsoft SQL, supporting diverse IT environments.

• BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management helps a company manage financial performance by providing a deeper view of cost drivers and impact on profitability. The new version provides greater precision for organizations with large volumes of data that allows customers to build models that can include SKU and transaction-level detail, officials said.

• BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation brings together business performance data from across a variety of business lines, entities, and geographies. The new version is deeply integrated with BusinessObjects XI 3.0, allowing organizations to leverage their BI investment.

In addition, SAP announced the availability of BusinessObjects Xcelsius Present, a data visualization tool that transforms static Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets into visuals and allows business users to share them via Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe PDF files. Using interactive graphics — including dials, charts, and gauges that clearly convey business cases and demonstrate “what if” scenarios — presentations become more interactive experiences, the company said.

For small businesses, SAP announced that BusinessObjects’ Crystal Reports software has been integrated into the SAP Business One ERP application.

Business Objects’ officials reiterated this week that while they will continue to integrate deeply with SAP applications, the technology will remain open and agnostic. They also said they would not content themselves with winning over SAP customers.

Earlier this year, Business Objects launched the “Replace Hyperion Campaign,” targeting 100 replacements of the Oracle-owned Hyperion technologyin 100 days. So far, the company is on track, officials said, claiming they have elevated the pace to two replacements per day.

Doug Merritt, Business Objects’ executive vice president and general manager of business user global sales, told Manufacturing Executive that the Business Objects technology is “tightly integrated between consolidation and planning, and natively integrated with SAP so there is a lower total cost of ownership. We know where Hyperion is in the installed base, and we are aggressively going after accounts we think are prone to switch back to SAP.”