Business Objects an SAP company brought forward their integrated strategy for where they plan to strategically advance their organization and products into the future at their 2008 Influencer Summit. The core emphasis was on the product strategy and success of the portfolio of products across enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and business intelligence (BI) and information management. This is a blend of products from Business Objects and SAP, along with companies they have acquired over the last couple of years. Business Objects has focused on how they can advance their products to address the broad set of user demographics and interactive requirements of them across organizations using Web 2.0 Internet technology.

Thematically, Business Objects launched the summit with their direction for enabling business management with products that can optimize business performance from strategy to execution throughout an organization. To emphasize the importance of this approach, SAP brought Robert S. Kaplan to present on the principles of his new book written with David P. Norton, The Execution Premium. The book and methodology are part of his academic and management consulting work as part of Palladium Consulting. Interesting point as Palladium has transitioned from thought leadership through the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, which is now defunct as part of the decline of balanced scorecard methodology, to management and technology consulting.

Business Objects is more than glee on the potential of their products for business management to support strategy and objectives across management processes. SAP, Business Objects and even acquired Pilot Software have been focused on this mission in the past, but now using the large organization to establish the opportunities moving forward. Comparatively, Oracle through acquisition of Hyperion and IBM’s acquisition of Cognos are advancing to similar approaches to the market with varying characteristics to their applications and integration of products.

Business Objects has advanced their enterprise performance management (EPM) products that are completing their first phases of integration into a common platform and framework. Products like SAP Strategy Management 7.0, Business Planning and Control (BPC) 7.0 are now integrated to a common platform approach using SAP NetWeaver and other products such as BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation 7.0 and BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management 7.0 are integrated into the core Business Objects XI 3.0 BI technology and beginning integration with SAP NetWeaver. Making the tough decision and leaving many BI and performance management products behind that were duplicate, Business Objects is providing open visibility into their future. Business Objects as part of SAP has now assembled a suite for financial performance management that is directly competitive with Oracle with Hyperion and IBM with Cognos. The competitive aspect of the suite is the depth of each product and then the integration into the platform but at the same finance is investing into areas outside of their direct organizationally responsibility that we broadly call Operational Performance Management where operations, sales, customer and workforce generate revenue or incur costs and more timely visibility into their performance and adjustments to plans can impact financial performance.

To address performance management throughout an organization inside and outside of finance is SAP Strategy Management 7.0, which now brings significant new advancements in capability through an interactive experience that supports the strategic and operational direction of an organization. The product is also integrated with SAP GRC Risk Management, where risk can be managed with strategies and governed through monitoring. Though not as clear with the name, Strategy Management can provide a range of business management needs that plays a critical role in operational performance management. SAP Strategy Management can help define and track strategy, establish goals and objectives and then monitor initiatives that can be brought together in a scorecard or dashboard application.

In BI, Business Objects has continued to advance their portfolio of products which is critical for their business and companies using SAP. Business Objects’BI portfolio and XI version 3.0 this year includes a set of dedicated tools for specific needs. These products and needs include Crystal Reports for production reporting, WebIntelligence Voyager for ad hoc reporting and analysis, Xcelsius for dashboards and Polestar for discovery, analysis and search and recently added Text Analytics that came from the Business Objects acquisition of Inxight. Business Objects also came out with their Predictive Workbench for statistics in partnership with SPSS. SAP also announced a new product called Xcelsius Present which advances the use of Adobe Flash that integrates into spreadsheets and presentations from Microsoft Office to provide an interactive and usable experience for decision-making. Business Objects has to rationalize their use of Flash technologies which have limitations on mobile devices and how they support other web based technologies. For example Business Objects has not yet officially supported Apple iPhone as the Opera browser does not support Adobe Flash and will require some careful navigation of capabilities to ensure simple access and integration with information.

Organizations that want BI on top of SAP from Business Objects have many options and choices of products that provide access to SAP; however many new ones are still being proven in new deployments. Business Objects is in a challenging position as accessing data and analyzing and reporting on SAP BW and SAP R/3 is done across many products. Business Objects is recommending BusinessObjects XI 3.0 and to evaluate WebIntelligence Voyager an interactive OLAP product on SAP BW 3.5 and SAP BI 7. In addition, Business Objects Polestar is a new product that can be used for searching and analyzing data which will be improved and will operate on top of SAP BI Accelerator (BIA) by end of 2008. A big improvement over previous generations of WebIntelligence, which was not designed to interface efficiently with SAP BW and SAP BusinessExplorer (BEx), is not sufficient for broader needs of business users. It is now commonly discussed across the Internet that the product roadmap for interactive OLAP on SAP will be the integration and evolution of BusinessObjects’ Polestar and SAP Business Explorer into what is referred to as Pioneer. This will be, of course, one of the key products for SAP in the next couple of years for conducting interactive analysis or OLAP for business users.

Organizations using SAP BW are being requested by SAP to upgrade to SAP NetWeaver BI version 7 service pack 1 to ensure better performance of interfacing from Business Objects XI products. This push to the latest platform will help ease transition for products in the future but the BI products from SAP like Business Explorer and Web Application Designer will be phased out over the coming years. Making this step forward will require resources but is a necessary step if you are going to continue to invest into Business Objects or SAP. Of course for those that want to pull data out of SAP R/3 and BW can look at Business Objects Data Integrator and packaged RapidMarts for establishing a separate foundation for BI. For those that are looking for more robust reporting and interactive capabilities today should look closely at the Crystal EDGE product suite which can provide the most proven integration as Crystal has for many years integrated into SAP R/3 and SAP BW. Though it is marketed as a SMB solution, it is more than robust for enterprise clients and deployments and would be on top of my short list for evaluation on SAP. This recommendation is not being promoted by SAP as it does not support the overall product strategy of other products operating on the Business Objects platform that might be important to your future use.

Unique with Business Objects compared to the other large provider like Oracle and IBM is their focus on applying analytics to unstructured data through their BI capabilities with Text Analytics that was part of their Inxight acquisition. The software as a service (SaaS) efforts are expanding as well at Business Objects as the information and BI on demand products are continuing to expand to reach business analysts and others who need faster and simpler methods to operate. While still early, Business Objects with their own SaaS efforts are expanding their efforts to reach further into the SMB market and collaboration with other providers like salesforce.com and where SAP has had recent challenges. Business Objects is yet to expand and provide many of their core BI products or more important SAP Strategy Management in their SaaS efforts. Steps in this direction are actively being examined as they do recognize that many organizations want to start small before they make large enterprise commitments.

Business Objects has integrated the people and products into one organization to optimally develop and deliver performance management, business intelligence and governance, risk and control for the industry. In the immediate next year, the challenge will be to get further integration of the product lines with the BI technology based on BusinessObjects XI and the application platform SAP NetWeaver to simplify the administration and leveraged value of the technologies. I have been critical of the integration of Business Objects and SAP as written in January - BI Market Chaos Accelerates with SAP and Business Objects Combination  but many solid steps in the right direction are simplifying the complexities I outlined. Business Objects is also providing answers to prospective buyers and to myself at the recent Influencer Summit that increase my confidence significantly on their product roadmap. Business Objects is a significant global leader and is a vendor that should be examined despite some short term integration challenges with SAP. Business Objects has a clearer product roadmap that can help mitigate any project and migration issues.

Let me know your thoughts.

I just attended the Actuate user conference where they brought forward a series of new advancements utilizing open source and new platform capabilities into the market. Actuate’s new version of performance management applications and advancements in mobility further extend their use in organizations. Actuate is well known to larger corporations for significantly large deployments of reporting and information to the enterprise and across the Internet to customers and suppliers. Actuate has been recently shifting away from direct engagement in traditional BI market of query, reporting and analysis to data warehouses and instead extending their support of developers through open source and Internet/Intranet type applications. Actuate is extending their support for Rich Internet Applications as the need for information across business and to consumers requires very scalable platforms that integrate across the enterprise.

Actuate also entered into the open source market in 2005 with their BIRT (BI and Reporting Technology) contribution to Eclipse and their open source BIRT community. Actuate has bet that the use of open source will be a key component for their future and starting point for developers, where at some point will purchase support, services and then the more robust commercial products. In fact, Actuate open source efforts now contribute to 10% of Actuate revenue. This open source based approach to their commercial enterprise software, expands Actuate’s reach across the world and deepens relationships with developers. The benefit for developers is that it is easier to download and work with their basic products before determining what is needed for deployments that require support, services or higher end technology.

Actuate has advanced their main commercial product, now Actuate 10, that brings new interactive user capabilities to the platform. It uses technology now integrated with Actuate BIRT like Ajax and Adobe Flash object library with charts and gadgets, page level security and web application interfaces like JavaScript that help develop web mashup type applications that operate as Rich Internet Applications. In addition, they’ve made advancements with their e.Reports, e.Spreadsheet and designers which now support Microsoft Excel 2007 more readily and deliver output functionality to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). In addition, a new intuitive chart and query builder helps simplify the platform for interactive needs of business users, analysts and developers. Actuate is making the right steps to improve the usability of Actuate 10, using more progressive Web 2.0 capabilities while ensuring they continue to make the platform as robust as possible for developers.

As part of their efforts in performance management, with the acquisition of PerformanceSoft in 2006, Actuate is advancing the Views product with version 8. Utilizing BIRT and the advancements in visualization, reporting and spreadsheet capabilities are used to advance the capabilities of Views. Actuate has moved to further leverage the core Actuate platform to provide more capabilities along with supporting platforms such as Microsoft Vista and Microsoft SQL Server. The PerformanceSoft acquisition has been a difficult balance as investing into the developer and IT markets is completely different than servicing into business for performance management.

Actuate also made a crucial step forward in making information from Actuate and BIRT more readily available across mobile devices. Research in Motion (RIM) the technology provider of the Blackberry was a major sponsor of the Actuate conference. The Blackberry is now easily integrated with Actuate to the platform through mobile software integration technology. Actuate, who has partnered with Webalo to provide the mobile dashboard product has jointly developed Actuate Mobile. This new appliance provides a bridge for information from Actuate to be more easily mapped to a variety of mobile devices including Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile and Apple iPhone. Supporting mobility and devices was an absent component of Actuate products and is a step in the right direction. Further investments and integration with mobile technology along with demonstrations is critical for further adoption and validation of Actuate mobile efforts.

Actuate is stepping forward confidently in bringing open source more integrated into their core technology utilizing BIRT. They are also working to expand their business presence in performance management with Views into operations and finance management while also advancing their mobility capabilities and extending information delivery to more consumers. All of this is no easy set of tasks for a company who has survived the vendor consolidation in the BI market with their unique and distinguishing broad deployments outside of the enterprise. Actuate has many competitors including in the open source BI market like JasperSoft, Pentaho and even Spago which they have to contend with as they start to see deeper use of their open source technology. Actuate is redefining their position in the market and advancing their open source efforts to ensure their business continuity over the next decade by helping  organizations deliver a new generation of web and Internet applications.

Let me know your thoughts.

Instead of just making a broad set of statements on the recent Oracle announcements made on July 16th, this is a little more depth and perspective that might be useful for you as you think about Oracle and their BI and performance management approach to the market. Oracle updates on the market in their EPM and BI product areas were delivered by their key executives Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, Thomas Kurian SVP Server Technologies and John Kopcke, SVP and GBU of EPM and BI. Oracle rolled out their last product strategy over a year ago after their acquisition of Hyperion and portfolio of BI and performance management technologies. The last major update to customers from Oracle was at Oracle OpenWorld in fall of 2007 where there seemed to be more confusion than actual answers as pointed out in previous blog - Oh Oracle Let’s Be Honest Now.

The devil is in the details of these announcements and the impact on your review or use of these products needs to be clear and precise to ensure you charter the proper path forward. Oracle has continued to operate their EPM portfolio of applications and technologies in their middleware portfolio of products and even sales organization that primarily focuses on IT and has little focus on business. This is conflicting, as applications for performance management are not middleware but intended for business. The lack of clarity between their middleware and performance management applications has confused those in LOB, who do not care about Oracle database or application server which is managed by IT and usually have no specific interest in these technologies. This is a critical issue that Oracle has as LOB are the individuals driving the sponsorship and budget for this class of applications called EPM.

This apparent disconnect by Oracle on EPM, which they manage as middleware, continues to alienate buyers. There has also been significant turnover in the sales organization, leaving little to no strategic sales force to sell to executive and business management. By selling as part of middleware technologies, Oracle will not reach their full potential in the market. This is not to say they will not sell the technology but the questions is whether they get deployed and valued by business in what they are presenting as part of their management excellence approach to performance management. Let’s take a quick trip through their deep set of details they announced from the business and technology perspective to provide more color.

Finance and Operations
Oracle EPM is really focused on the competency of finance and is just starting to deliver on their vision of what they call “management excellence.” For those in finance, Oracle has continued to provide incremental usability and functionality updates to Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management applications, as these are the core applications that have the most customers and deployments. Oracle is building further integration into the Oracle ERP suite of accounting applications, which is critical for finance to streamline their financial management processes. Oracle previously had persuaded many of their customers to use the previous set of applications like Oracle Planning and Budgeting and applications from their PeopleSoft acquisition which are in maintenance mode and are not recommended to purchase now. Oracle highlighted Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management which is built on Essbase and touted its uniqueness based on dimensional aspects of the applications; however other viable options are available from Acorn, IBM-Cognos and SAP-Business Objects.

For the majority of business management in the realm of what I call Operational Performance Management (OPM), Oracle is just beginning to advance beyond the basics of BI and pre-built metric and business models. These operational BI applications are integrated with Oracle portfolio of transactional applications like PeopleSoft, Siebel and Oracle and do not address the technology independent needs of management processes across LOB areas. The needs of management and their teams across sales, supply chain and manufacturing, customer operations, and call centers are not just about integrating to a specific application where currently Oracle is a major supplier. As your organization has dozens of transactional applications, BI systems and spreadsheets in specific operational management areas, you need a set of applications that match to your management and accountability roles. For example, what an organization does in sales management is specific about their operational and performance requirements and is completely different for customer management teams who focus on customer experience and interactions. These specific applications that are needed are just as specific as the applications in ERP and CRM suites and the needs are a lot more than dashboards and metrics integrated into existing installed applications.

As part of the overlap of applications and products, Oracle brought forward a new product called Oracle Integrated Operational Planning which helps in the functional operational planning areas. But instead of presenting and expanding Oracle Hyperion Planning they introduced another new product which, for most organizations, will be a replacement to using Microsoft Excel and is not clear on the product and deployment advantages of this new application.

For Product and Technology
On the technology advancement Oracle has further leveraged the strength of their BI and EPM products with Oracle middleware and their application server which will help for enterprise IT teams looking for a strong and robust platform. Yet to the core of the Oracle EPM and diversity of BI products is that they have not yet become complete and integrated and are still cumbersome to integrate from business metrics across the technology and sharing master and metadata across the applications with many different administrative and interfaces required to work across the suite of products. These challenges are clearly evident across their portfolio of products that are just beginning to be integrated together.

To address this, Oracle has stepped in the right direction with new technologies that still need to be proven in real world deployments. One of these is Oracle new common calculation manager, a critical component in providing a consistent way to manage measure and metrics across teams of business users. Oracle EPM Architect is also a key component to start to bring the master data and metadata management aspects across the suite of applications and tools together. On the integration and information management to support the EPM direction, Oracle is bringing their suite of MDM technologies including Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, and Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management which have to be rationalized and considered as part of supporting an enterprise deployment. These technologies and the overlapping data integration technologies in the Oracle portfolio will need to be further reviewed to determine the best approach for your enterprise. I would provide a warning as all of these integration and information management technologies look good but are still being tested and integrated in real world deployments. I have yet to see an organization put them all to work in one enterprise as part of a significant commitment to Oracle’s approach to EPM and BI.

Oracle has also taken the long standing Oracle Hyperion Essbase and further integrated into their Oracle BI EE platform and is now a source to access analytic data or can source data from the Oracle BI EE platform. To help manage this Oracle has advanced Oracle Essbase Studio to more easily model and manage data and lineage in the OLAP server. This is a great step in the right direction as Essbase is used by thousands of organizations who have needs to further integrate it in the enterprise.

Oracle is stepping forward to rationalize their portfolio of disparate front end BI technology but just as important the varying interfaces for getting access to information for an individual business user. Oracle has advanced their EPM Workspace which can integrate business information and provide a unified portal type interface. Next Oracle SmartView for Office provides the first step in rationalizing to a single approach to accessing and analyzing information inside of Microsoft Office. Oracle SmartSpace brings a new generational approach to leveraging user interface type gadgets that can be placed directly on a desktop much like Google has done or what people are used to if they have experience with the Apple Macintosh interface. This step forward brings a significant simplification in bringing a new component type approach to the traditional rigid tool for every capability type approach.

Absent from Oracle’s overview of strategy and products were any reference on mobility. Something that Oracle recently announced was their Apple iPhone support which is called Oracle Business Indicators and is a significant move to simplify business functionality for BI. Though this requires some serious investment into Oracle applications and BI technologies, it brings new perspective to the rapid changes and needs of a workforce. The absence of this in their EPM and BI middleware division announcements was an indication of the silos of efforts across the applications and middleware technology groups at Oracle which will help you to be smarter than them when evaluating the varying types of form factors and requirements.

Overall
Oracle is obviously very serious about their $6 billion plus investment into Hyperion but the question will be whether they can organizationally establish and manage not just IT but business relationships and be considered a strategic supplier for BI and performance management. I have seen a lot of excitement about the announcements but if you look into the details, there is a lot to review and understand the impact of these announcements with a lot of brand new technology and integration that has yet to be proven in deployments. At the same time, Oracle has plenty of competition that is smaller and nimbler and it is yet to be proven if a single vendor strategy is going advance and innovate your organization.

Oracle likes to competitively compare themselves against IBM and SAP due to their acquisitions of Cognos and Business Objects respectively and their size globally. It is also not to say that these other large vendors do not have some of their own product evolution and roadmaps that need to be rationalized and tested. But this is only a distraction to the reality of having hundreds of vendors that are already deployed across finance, operations and IT where the applications and technology can provide similar or better capabilities. These providers as you can find on our site by LOB focus on performance management (www.ventanaresearch.com) have found plenty of opportunity with Oracle historical and acquired application customer base. Oracle has not made it easy for customers, especially for those having deployed Oracle financials and previous EPM products to advance into the new suite of products. For those customers, starting over is probably the only choice as the new products and strategy is completely different. If you do this, you should completely re-evaluate your technology and vendor for use in finance and your enterprise and compare Oracle against many other providers who are just as focused on your IT needs or have specific focus in LOB areas.

Oracle overall speaks about lower TCO, but has yet to add it all up and let you know what the license, maintenance and consulting costs will be for all of this EPM and BI technology. Providing more depth on the costs and how an organization could plan to budget for such a grand vision is one big issue and organizations continue not to be ready for establishing the business case for investment. This similar approach to promising a low TCO was made by Microsoft who also wants and requires you to buy into operating the latest version of Microsoft Office and back office technologies to find full value in their efforts. This requires organizations to re-evaluate their computing platform from desktops and notebooks to back room servers which is no easy feat to upgrade when you are talking about thousands of business users.

If Oracle is going to be successful in Performance Management for executives, finance and operations in sales and successful deployments they will have to significantly improve their management engagements and become a business partner to organizations. Historically Oracle has been up and down with their partnerships with business and management consulting firms who have this level and trusted relationships. Oracle has earned the right to have this type of relationship with IT and the CIO, but will not be able to immediately leverage this to gain significant advancements in business.

Oracle unloaded a lot of new announcements and advancements in their technology portfolio. It will take some time to determine their readiness for your organization. It is clear that it is still a very large portfolio of components that is not so simple and your plans for considering it will take some significant resources to rationalize and manage the deployment in your organization. Oracle is a key provider of BI and performance management and your challenge is to decipher and translate a lot of technology to the needs of your people and processes from management to business specific needs to determine the viability of their approach for your organization.