The Business Intelligence Blog

In the yearly, Americas Partner Excellence Award winners by Business Objects, it named Accenture as the Global Alliance Partner of the year.

From the Press Release -

Global Alliance Partner of the Year: Honors the partner that provided outstanding expertise in strategy, design, implementation, and customization services for Business Objects BI solutions. The Business Objects Global Alliance Partner of the Year is Accenture. Accenture was recognized once again in this category for its notable customer successes, solution innovation, and partner support. With many years of experience and nearly 4,000 successful client projects, Accenture has carved out a reputation for its unique approach to delivering complex data management, integration and analysis solutions that are aligned to business needs.

And that a welcome thing. Congrats BO !!

From the press release -

As a first indication of the successful pace of integration of the two companies, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Business Objects S.A. (NASDAQ: BOBJ) (Euronext Paris: ISIN code FR0004026250 – BOB) today revealed nine joint product packages, available this month, that will be sold by both organizations’ global sales teams. These packages were chosen to address the most common challenges facing business users from the C-suite to Main Street, which include: gaining better business insight, improving company performance and ensuring compliance with corporate governance policies. These packages will allow companies to license, install, and manage solutions from SAP and Business Objects in a single IT investment transaction.

The companies detail these new product packages in conjunction with today’s announcement acknowledging the next steps in SAP’s successful acquisition of Business Objects (see press release entitled “SAP and Business Objects Unite to Lead Emerging Market for Business Performance Optimization.”) With a broad showing of support from shareholders and business partners, SAP and Business Objects now embark on a road map to expand their wide lead in the market of software for business users into leadership in the emerging market for business performance optimization.

Very recently, two of the biggest Business Intelligence product companies were bought by bigger giants. That goes on the prove, the Business Intelligence arena is gaining momentum with the increasing demand for BI/Data Mining services.

Cognos was bought by IBM yesterday and three weeks ago, Business Objects was bought by the ERP giant, SAP.

From Cognos/IBM Press release –

The acquisition of Cognos supports IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, a cross-company initiative announced on February 16, 2006 that combines IBM’s strength in information integration, content and data management and business consulting services to unlock the business value of information. Integrating Cognos, the 23rd IBM acquisition in support of its Information on Demand strategy, will enable new business insights to be delivered to a broader set of people across an organization, beyond the traditional users of business intelligence.

From BO/SAP Press release –

Together, SAP and Business Objects intend to offer high-value solutions for process- and business-oriented professionals. The solutions will be designed to enable companies to strengthen decision processes, increase customer value and create sustainable competitive advantage through real-time, multi-dimensional business intelligence. SAP and Business Objects believe that customers will gain significant business benefits through the combination of new, innovative offerings of enterprise-wide business intelligence solutions along with embedded analytics in transactional applications. Additionally, the joint partner ecosystems will be fueled by the industry’s most powerful business process platform providing customers with the best enterprise information management platform available for SAP and non-SAP environments.

Having worked extensively with both these products, Cognos and Business Objects, I have to say its a great buy for IBM and SAP respectively. For IBM, Cognos a costly but a great BI tool is an amazing bombo with Teradata. For SAP, this will be a great addition to their ERP suite and Oracle is already huge in the BI area. We have to just wait for the next move. It’s getting to interest the on-lookers of the BI industry.

That is something to look forward, given the great performance of BO’s recent BO XI suite of tools. Their Q2 2007 results had 23% surge in total revenue and as they go adding more tools to their umbrella, it should be a welcomed by their customers.

Business Objects EPM applications will now be fully integrated onto the BusinessObjects™ XI platform, and built around the Integrated Data Model (IDM) as the cornerstone for Enterprise Performance Management. Integrating the suite of products onto the IDM provides a complete closed-loop solution which allows managers to better control their business and optimize its performance. The IDM links all finance, compliance and performance management processes and data in a single solution, reducing overall management cycle times, the costs associated with compliance, and drives greater accuracy into the financial reporting and planning process.

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