Almost a year after SAP’s $8.6 billion acquisition of Business Objects, the two companies have achieved most of their initial goals, and the business intelligence software vendor is beginning have an impact on SAP’s core product strategy and business practices, said Business Objects CEO John Schwarz, in a recent interview with Managing Automation.
When Business Objects and SAP began discussing the acquisition, Schwarz said, the companies identified three potential benefits: to boost SAP’s share of the BI market; to extend SAP’s market opportunity beyond applications; and to expand SAP’s market beyond its existing customer base.
Since the acquisition, Schwarz said, SAP has achieved those objectives by combining the Business Objects BI business with its own while working to retain the Business Objects brand and its appeal to non-users of SAP applications.
At the time SAP completed its acquisition of Business Objects on Jan. 15, 2008, Business Objects controlled 18.2% of the BI software market, while SAP claimed 7.9%, according to a report by Gartner Inc. Since then, Schwarz said, Business Objects has continued to grow its BI market share, despite the current economic downturn.
“Often after an acquisition, there is a dip in business,” Schwarz said. “We believe Hyperion [acquired by Oracle] and Cognos [acquired by IBM] have suffered that fate. We did not. We have grown every quarter since the acquisition. And we think we will be able to sustain it.”
Business Objects’ integration into SAP is largely complete, Schwarz said, with coordination of the two companies’ sales forces and product plans. “Now we are in the second stage of integration,” said Schwarz, now an SAP Executive Board member. “We are looking for opportunities to take unnecessary duplication out of the structure.”
Business Objects has taken a couple of steps to remain relevant to non-users of SAP applications as well as SAP application customers, Schwarz said. First, while working to more closely integrate its BI products with SAP’s NetWeaver middleware stack, Business Objects has stopped short of disabling features and functions accessible to users of non-SAP middleware stacks.
And, second, SAP has decided to manage the BI unit as a subsidiary, retaining the Business Objects brand, Schwarz said.