SAP’s $6.8 billion purchase of BusinessObjects last January was just the latest in a series of major acquisitions that has completely realigned the market for business intelligence and performance management software. Coming close on the heels of IBM’s purchase of Cognos and Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion, many SAP and BusinessObjects customers have wondered what effect the industry consolidation will have on their systems.

To guard against possible confusion, SAP has released a detailed roadmap, which addresses the direction of the combined SAP and BusinessObjects business intelligence products. Refer to for a complete overview of the roadmap.

“We tell our customers where we’re going to go. We give them three- and five-year views of where we’re going so they can do a better job planning. Even though some of these products don’t phase out until 2013, we’re telling them now so they can be ready,” says Jonathan Becher, senior vice president of marketing for BusinessObjects, SAP Global Marketing.

Take Your Time, Experts Say

Your approach to getting ready will depend on your specific business needs, but independent experts say time is on your side. Whether you’re running the BEx Report Designer, the BEx Web Application Designer, or another technology destined for the sunset, experts say you have plenty of time to plan ahead for change at your own pace.

“We tell our clients just to breathe through their noses and continue doing what they’re doing right now. It’s a good idea to keep your eye on the ball and see what’s coming, but this is not a situation where you will wake up one morning and everything is gone. It’s going to be supported going forward for many years, and then there will be a very orderly transition,” says Bjarne Berg, director of business intelligence, MyITgroup.

Berg likens the transition to that of major SAP BW releases for the past decade, in which new technologies were always included and obsolete ones phased out. “Every major release — whether we went from version 1 to version 2, or from 2 to 3, or from 3 to 7 — has included new technologies. When the next release comes out in 2009, the BEx Report Designer will still be there. It will still run in parallel with Crystal Reports. It’s not until the release after that that we will see the BEx Report Designer go away. What we tell our clients is that when they decide to go to the next release, they should sit down and decide what technology they are giving up versus what technology they are shifting. We tell them to do that during a normal upgrade plan. It’s not urgent right now, but it’s worth keeping an eye on,” says Berg.

John Colbert, vice president of research and analysis at BPM Partners, suggests a two-part approach. The first is to cultivate expertise in your existing solution in the event that it outlasts SAP’s support or enhancements. The second is to reassess your requirements carefully before deciding whether and how to upgrade.

“When you made a purchasing decision to acquire a technology platform, you had very specific business issues you were trying to address. Going forward, you want to challenge yourself to see if those same business issues exist or if there are a whole new set of issues to address. If it’s the latter, it’s like starting over with your requirements and how this platform can meet your needs versus considering the upgrade path,” says Colbert.

Becher is quick to point out that SAP will not force customers to switch immediately if they are using technologies that SAP has scheduled to phase out.

“One of the first questions SAP customers ask is whether they should stop using BEx and start using Crystal Reports. The answer is no. If BEx solves your problems today, keep using it, because we’ll continue to support it and invest in it. However, there are a number of incremental features and capabilities in Crystal — particularly around report delivery and use by non-experts — that you may want to start adopting. Eventually we will merge BEx functionality with BusinessObjects functionality so you can’t tell the difference,” says Becher.

Why SAP Bought BusinessObjects

To fully understand SAP’s plans for integrating BusinessObjects (now officially known as BusinessObjects, an SAP Company), it is important to understand SAP’s reasons for targeting the vendor.

The primary strategic driver for the acquisition was to further SAP’s oft-stated goal of “closing the gap between strategy and execution,” according to Becher. “In modern organizations, the people who make strategy decisions are completely different from the people who execute them,” he says. “The big reason we did this was to break down the wall between decisions and actions — so more people could be involved in helping businesses optimize their performance.

While SAP executes automated, regular tasks well, BusinessObjects is a leader in providing information that strategic decision-makers need to compete in a changing climate, says Becher. By weaving the two together behind the scenes, SAP will offer its customers a premium product unavailable to users of other ERP systems.

In his keynote address at SAPPHIRE 2008 Berlin in May, BusinessObjects CEO John Schwartz cited the Disneyland Resort Paris theme park as an example of this principle in action. The park attracted 12 million visitors per year but was less than half as profitable as the Disney parks located in California and Florida. Disney identified the culprit as its difficulty reallocating staff resources during periods of inclement weather, as patrons flocked away from rides and toward restaurants and shops within the park.

To solve the problem, BusinessObjects helped Disney construct an operations dashboard tied to data stored in the park’s SAP system. By comparing weather and crowd data from last year, last week, or yesterday with real-time conditions in the park, Euro Disney executives can more accurately predict crowd flows and reassign staff to areas that need them the most. Euro Disney executives can now send Short Message Service (SMS) messages to staff, directing them to particular areas of the park based on strategy decisions made using a real-time BusinessObjects analysis of SAP data.

Today, Schwartz said, Disneyland Resort Paris is the second-most profitable Disney theme park and ranks highest in customer satisfaction. “This is not about reporting. This is about improving business performance,” he says.

The latest release of BusinessObjects software, BusinessObjects XI 3.0, includes back-end technologies specifically designed to integrate with SAP software, Schwartz added. Becher says the two companies will further enhance their offerings to capitalize on the partnership.

“We’re doubling down on the part that needs to be deeply integrated with SAP. SAP customers get more value because the API’s can be shared, the execution can be monitored, and we can close the loop between strategy and execution. It will work better on SAP technology, but it’s not limited to that,” says Becher.

In fact, BusinessObjects platform agnosticism was another key driver of the acquisition. Busines Objects will continue as a standalone product suite for use with other ERP systems.

Becher estimates that only about 30% of the combined SAP and BusinessObjects customer base are using both products, but the extended reach of the two fits squarely into SAP’s focus on Business Network Transformation (BNT). BNT refers to the increased need for collaboration among enterprises in a globalized world. Instead of trying to excel at every facet of business, successful companies of the future will focus on their key competencies and rely heavily on partners to offer customers a comprehensive product. Becher says SAP is expanding its own business network with the BusinessObjects acquisition.

Experts Rally Behind SAP Strategy

Some industry experts are praising the acquisition, saying it represents a bold step to the front of the pack in business intelligence technology.

“For quite a while, people have asked for this functionality. SAP heard that loud and clear and bought a best-of-breed technology, spending $6 billion on it. Now they’re integrating it in a very orderly fashion and then telling you three years up front which technologies they’re keeping and which they’re not. What could be better than that? I am very much in support of this strategy,” says Berg.

In particular, Berg believes SAP and BusinessObjects are uniquely compatible technologies that should work well together.

The strength of SAP is really in the back end – with technologies such as the extractors, the DataStore objects, the InfoCubes, the use of aggregates, and the security interface with the portal. That is really where SAP has always been strong. SAP has also come a long way over the past few years in the front end. But instead of resting on its laurels, SAP decided not to go incrementally and leapt forward into the best-of-breed with BusinessObjects,” he says.

Paul Halley, vice president of business intelligence at Inforte, agrees that SAP’s strategy is sound but adds that the message coming from SAP might be just as important. “From my perspective, SAP and BusinessObjects sent a clear message by keeping BusinessObjects a separate company. I think that sent a stronger message than what Oracle sent when it acquired Hyperion,” says Halley. “They nailed the strategy. The reason for the acquisition is a good one. The message they’re sending is a good one. They just need to reach more people. They need to reach the people who aren’t yet asking the question.”

The Road Ahead for SAP Business Intelligence
The overlap between certain SAP and BusinessObjects products forced SAP to make some decisions on which technologies to keep and which to abandon. SAP determined the roadmap by consulting with internal product managers and selected customers, says Jonathan Becher, senior vice president of marketing for BusinessObjects, SAP Global Marketing.

“In every case, there was a clear product that was ahead of the other ones. So we designed migration paths for all of them so you end up with the same cohesive solution at the end,” he says.

The primary areas of overlap identified by SAP are enterprise reporting, ad-hoc query and reporting, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analysis, dashboards, and SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM). The roadmaps (Figure A) for each product in those areas are as follows:

• For enterprise reporting, SAP has announced that its strategy and key investments will center on the BusinessObjects' product portfolio. BusinessObjects’ Crystal Reports will remain the preferred premium product, while SAP will phase out the BEx Report Designer by 2016. The BEx Report Designer 7.1 will be the final release of that product. SAP base customers will have the option of selecting a Crystal Reports Trial version beginning in 2009, which will be replaced by Crystal Reports Base in 2010.
• SAP has selected BusinessObjects Web Intelligence as the preferred technology going forward for ad-hoc query and reporting. The SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) toolset does not extensively cover this area.
• For OLAP analysis, both premium and base customers should use BusinessObjects Voyager until 2009 and then switch to “Pioneer,” which is a code name for a forthcoming product combining Voyager and BEx OLAP tool capabilities.
• The BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboard product will be enhanced to Xcelsius+ in 2009 and will become the flagship product for data visualization. Users of the Web Application Designer can continue to use that product, but it will not be enhanced after Release 7.1 in 2008.
• Customers using BusinessObjects Data Quality (DQ) will be able to migrate data to SAP NetWeaver MDM beginning in 2008. By 2010, SAP will offer an enhanced version of MDM that integrates DQ capabilities.

Figure A

The combined SAP and Business Objects business intelligence roadmap (Source: SAP)

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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