Targeting mid-market manufacturers that may not have the budgets or the technical know-how to take advantage of enterprise business intelligence applications, Business Objects today unveiled a low-cost set of applications for financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting. The new Business Objects Edge Planning product is part of the company's Edge BI series for mid-size companies. Edge Planning carries a price of $25,000 for 10 users, including first-year maintenance, support, and training credits. That price point is 60% below the $62,500 that companies would pay to license the planning and budgeting module of Business Objects' Enterprise product, including maintenance and support, said Todd Rowe, vice president and general manager for the company's Mid-Market division. Business Objects, which recently announced its intention to be acquired by SAP in the first quarter of next year, also introduced an integration toolkit that allows users of its Edge series products to easily access data from SAP's R/3, Business Warehouse, and All-in-One platforms. The new SAP integration kit is listed at $12,000 and represents an alternative to Business Objects' integration toolkit for enterprise customers, which typically costs $50,000 to $75,000, including integration services. "With the Edge products, business intelligence is no longer the exclusive realm of the privileged few with large budgets," said Rowe in an interview with Managing Automation. "This is BI for the rest of us." The Edge Planning product, which is based on Business Objects' enterprise planning and budgeting product, includes pre-packaged applications for strategic planning, capital planning, payroll planning, productivity management, activity-based budgeting, and incentive compensation management. Edge Planning also includes a visual modeling feature that lets users test what-if scenarios by manipulating projections. The Edge Planning product includes an Excel-like user interface and a series of pre-built, industry-specific budgeting and planning methodologies. Initial vertical industries covered include banking, government, healthcare, insurance, and retail. Business Objects plans to offer discrete and process manufacturing methodologies in the first half of 2008. Unlike the Business Objects enterprise planning and budgeting product — which can be deployed on multiple servers — the Edge Planning tool can be deployed only on a single server: either Microsoft .NET or Linux (Red Hat and SUSE). Business Objects also plans to release an on-demand version of the Edge Planning product, Rowe said. The Edge Planning product joins Edge Reporting and Visualization tools, which Business Objects introduced in February. The company also sells Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports On Demand reporting products to small and mid-size customers. While those products address core BI capabilities, Edge Planning is specifically aimed at planning and budgeting processes and must be licensed separately. Business Objects is targeting mid-market customers, Rowe said, because it is a fast-growing market segment for BI technology. Business Objects believes BI sales into companies with 1,000 or fewer employees are growing by 12.5% per year, 50% faster than the enterprise market, Rowe said. While most large enterprises have already invested in BI tools, many smaller manufacturers have continued to use Excel spreadsheets for analytics and reporting, he noted. Business Objects two years ago created a dedicated mid-market division, which includes 1,000 employees. The company's goal, Rowe said, is to grow its revenue from mid-market companies from its current 38% to 50% by 2010.