PALO ALTO, CA — A day after revealing that its $6.8 billion tender offer had been accepted by shareholders representing 82% of Business Objects' shares, SAP AG yesterday hit the ground running, announcing nine new performance optimization, business intelligence, and small and mid-size enterprise products that combine SAP and Business Objects software.
SAP CEO Henning Kagermann and Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker, at a press conference here, also detailed SAP's long-term strategy for Business Objects, which, Kagermann said, will operate as an independent business unit of SAP under Business Objects CEO John Schwarz.
SAP's $400 million business user division, which is responsible for the company's governance, risk, and compliance software and other products mainly targeting financial users, will become part of the Business Objects business unit. Doug Merritt, SAP corporate officer and head of the Business User division, will report to Schwarz.
Schwarz will be named to SAP's executive board, and Business Objects' founder, Bernard Liautaud, will be nominated to SAP's supervisory board.
SAP said SAP Americas COO John Nugent will also join the new business unit in charge of global field operations. The combined unit will have 7,000 employees.
SAP decided to establish Business Objects as a semi-autonomous business unit, Kagermann said, to avoid the impression that Business Objects will focus exclusively on integration with SAP applications and data sources. In fact, Schwarz said, "We are still committed to openness. We are aligned with SAP, but we are equally committed to non-SAP platforms." To illustrate his point, Schwarz said, "We will have BI solutions on top of Oracle that are better than Oracle's own BI solution."
SAP's October offer for Business Objects was one of a series of software industry moves last year that saw three leading vendors in the BI space snapped up by large software companies. In addition to the SAP-Business Objects deal, Oracle acquired financial BI software provider Hyperion Solutions Corp., and IBM bought Business Objects competitor Cognos Inc.
While Business Objects under SAP will continue to focus on non-SAP data sources, Kagermann made it clear that SAP's long-term strategy is to integrate Business Objects' BI tools tightly into SAP's applications. In fact, Kagermann said, SAP's plan is to use Business Objects BI tools to enable what he called closed-loop business performance optimization. The Business Objects BI tools will be deeply embedded in SAP's applications, allowing customers to gain insight into business changes and to quickly adjust their business processes without time-consuming involvement by IT programmers, he said.
Kagermann said SAP will achieve this closed-loop capability by integrating Business Objects' BI tools, SAP's applications, and the business process management elements of SAP's NetWeaver SOA platform. Recently, for example, SAP announced enhancements to NetWeaver that feature a new Process Integration product that includes an event processing feature that, using business rules, can monitor business events and automatically resolve alerts.
"If we bring these pieces together, you can imagine what we can do in the future," Kagermann said.
SAP officials yesterday declined to say when such closed-loop business performance optimization incorporating Business Objects BI tools will be available.
SAP said it will begin this month selling nine products that bundle existing SAP and Business Objects performance optimization, BI, and small and mid-size enterprise tools. The bundles allow customers to license, install, and manage previously separate products under one transaction.
The performance optimization packages, for example, include a Financial Performance Management package that includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management products from Business Objects.
The other new performance optimization bundle includes governance, risk, and compliance tools from SAP and Business Objects.
New bundled BI tools include:
- Visualization and Reporting
- Enterprise Query, Reporting, and Analysis
- Data Integration and Data Quality Management
- Master Data Services
Also, new bundled packages for small and mid-size enterprises include:
- SAP Business All-in-One and BusinessObjects Edge Standard: This package combines SAP's All-in-One application suite for small and mid-sized businesses with Business Objects' Edge BI tools for mid-sized companies.
- Crystal Reports Server
- BusinessObjects Edge Series: This existing set of BI tools for small and mid-sized businesses features new integration with other SAP applications for mid-sized customers.
Separately, Kagermann and Apotheker briefly addressed
yesterday's news of rival Oracle's successful bid for BEA Systems and provided an update on SAP's new
Business ByDesign on-demand product for small and mid-sized companies.
Of Oracle's long and ultimately successful pursuit of BEA, Apotheker said Oracle will now need to resolve overlap between BEA's suite of middleware products and Oracle's own Fusion Middleware suite.
Apotheker also implied that as fewer and fewer large software companies remain to fuel Oracle's growth-through-acquisition strategy, the company's CEO, Larry Ellison, is being required to overpay for companies like BEA. "He has to pay more and more for less and less," Apotheker said.
Regarding Business ByDesign, Kagermann said SAP's goal in 2008 is "to prove we can build a profitable volume business." To do this, he said, SAP must build a robust third-party sales channel. On that count, he said, "We have a way to go."
Kagermann declined to reveal the number of licensed Business ByDesign users SAP expects to sign in 2008 or how many users SAP has currently.