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Business Objects - Software - Category Directory
(408)
953-6000
157-159 Rue Anatole France
92300
Levallois-Perret, France
www.businessobjects.com
Sales
$561
million
Business Description
Business Objects is a leading worldwide provider of Business Intelligence
solutions, which we refer to in this document as “Business Intelligence.” We
develop, market and distribute software that enables organizations to track,
understand and manage enterprise performance within and beyond the
enterprise to make better, more informed business decisions. Users can view
and interact with key performance indicators in a dashboard, create new
queries or reports, access catalogs of reports and do simple or complex
analysis of data. Instead of struggling with complex and technical database
terminology, users interact with data using business representations of
information, or “business objects,” with which they are familiar. This
proprietary technology is commonly referred to as the “semantic layer.” Our
products are designed to be easy to use and architected to be secure,
scalable and extensible. We have sold our products to more than 24,000
customers in over 80 countries.
In order to implement our vision of offering customers a complete solution
and product suite for Business Intelligence, we acquired Crystal Decisions
in December 2003. We believe this combination enhanced our leadership
position in Business Intelligence, increased our customer base and
strengthened our product line. We believe that in terms of product lines,
distribution channels, and international presence, the combination of
Business Objects and Crystal Decisions is highly complementary. We offer our
customers what we believe is the de facto standard in reporting, Crystal
Reports, together with leading interactive query and analysis solutions, and
world-class enterprise performance management (“EPM”) products for
scorecarding and dashboards. Our technology suite is complemented by data
integration technologies and specific, customizable analytical applications
that we believe provides best practices in business analysis. The product
line offers a platform for organizations looking to standardize on a single
Business Intelligence solution in order to reduce total cost of ownership.
We and several of our wholly owned subsidiaries entered into an agreement
and plan to acquire Crystal Decisions and its majority stockholder Seagate
Software (Cayman) Holdings Corporation (“SSCH”) (collectively the “Crystal
Decisions Acquisition”) dated July 18, 2003, and amended August 29, 2003. On
December 11, 2003, the Crystal Decisions Acquisition closed for total
consideration of $307.6 million in cash and approximately 23.3 million
Business Objects ADSs. As of December 11, 2003, Crystal Decisions had
delivered 15 million product licenses and had more than 1,800 employees in
more than 30 offices worldwide.
We were incorporated in France in 1990. Our principal executive offices are
located at 157-159, rue Anatole France, Levallois-Perret, France and 3030
Orchard Parkway, San Jose, California. Our website is
www.businessobjects.com. Information contained on, or accessible through,
our website is not part of this report. You may obtain copies of the reports
we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) from our
website.
Products
Business Objects offers a complete suite of Business Intelligence software
that enable organizations to track, understand and manage enterprise
performance. Our solutions leverage the information that is stored in an
array of corporate databases, ERP and other packaged applications. Our
products include data integration, query, reporting, online analytical
processing, information broadcasting, business alerts, analytical
application frameworks and pre-packaged analytic applications. Our products
also include administration tools that enable information technology
professionals to set up and deploy our products across an enterprise. The
software can be deployed in web, Windows or mobile environments to provide
greater flexibility.
In April 2003, we released the newest version of our Business Intelligence
product suite, Business Objects Enterprise 6, which enables organizations to
track, understand and manage their enterprise performance. Enterprise 6 is
an update to the entire Business Objects product line.
In January 2004, we released the newest version of our enterprise reporting
products, Crystal Version 10, which combines Crystal Enterprise, an
efficiently scalable and reliable enterprise reporting platform, with the
powerful report design capabilities of Crystal Analysis and Crystal Reports,
which we believe is the de facto standard in reporting. Together, the
Crystal Version 10 products provide organizations with the ability to make
better, faster decisions for improved business performance.
We have three product families: Business Intelligence Platform, Enterprise
Analytic Applications and Data Integration.
We currently maintain and support both Business Objects and Crystal
Decisions products. We plan to integrate them into a unified product suite
in the future.
Business Intelligence Platform
Business Objects Reporting
Our reporting tools provide richly formatted, interactive information
delivery. They enable the process of accessing and formatting data, as well
as delivering information inside and outside the organization. Business
Objects Reporting serves as the foundation of a broader Business
Intelligence strategy by providing the most-requested pieces of information
reliably and securely — through the web or embedded in enterprise
applications.
Business Objects Reporting products provide organizations with the following
benefits:
• Powerful authoring — Provides broad data access from any source with data
formatting capabilities that create graphically rich, interactive reports.
• Scalable infrastructure — Centralizes management and on-demand processing,
which drive the secure and reliable delivery of reports to thousands of
users both inside and outside the organization.
• Open platform — Enables reporting and infrastructure components to be
embedded in a wide variety of applications on all of the platform.
• Proven technology — Leverages the 10th generation, industry leading
Crystal Reports technology that has been licensed to millions of users.
Our products in this category include Crystal Reports and Crystal
Enterprise.
Business Objects Query and Analysis
Business Objects Query and Analysis tools allow end users to interact with
business information and answer ad hoc questions themselves with minimal
knowledge of the underlying data sources and structures.
Business Objects Query and Analysis tools provide organizations with the
following benefits:
• Easy to use interface — Users can author their own reports and queries
with minimal knowledge of the underlying data sources and structures
required. They can then intuitively interact with the data and perform
additional analysis.
• Powerful query and analysis — Technology resolves complex multi-data
source schemas and enables more reliable results and consistent performance.
• Open platform — Broad platform and operating systems support provides
query and analysis compatibility with existing organizational
infrastructures.
• Proven technology — Thousands of customers have deployed query and
analysis within their intranet and to customers, partners and suppliers via
Business Intelligence extranets.
Our products in this category include BusinessObjects, BusinessQuery,
Crystal Analysis, and WebIntelligence.
Business Objects Information Infrastructure
Business Objects Information Infrastructure provides a set of common
services to simplify deployment and allow for the management of Business
Intelligence tools, reports, performance management and analytic
applications. End-user components include portal, scheduling and software
developer kits, while administrative components include security, auditing
and data access features.
Business Objects Information Infrastructure products provide organizations
with the following benefits:
• Broad deployment capability — Built for broad-scale, mission-critical
deployment of data access, reporting and information delivery to the
extended enterprise.
• Centralized management — Information technology departments can control
data access, system performance and user functionality from a central
location.
• Open platform — Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing data, web,
application and technology stack investments without imposing a new set of
standards and processes.
Our products in this category include BusinessObjects Developer Suite,
BusinessObjects Enterprise Professional, BusinessObjects InfoView and
Crystal Enterprise Professional.
Enterprise Analytic Applications
Business Objects Performance Management
Business Objects Performance Management helps users track and analyze key
business metrics via management dashboards, scorecards and alerting. Goals
can be set around metrics and assigned to owners, thereby aligning people
with strategies. These products also support group decision-making and
analysis through integrated collaboration and workflow capabilities.
Business Objects Performance Management products provide organizations with
the following benefits:
• Goal management — Manage goals to align people with strategy, deploy
scorecards to track performance and close the loop back to decisions using
collaboration and guided analysis.
• Flexible dashboarding — Define key performance indicators, customize
dashboard display and extend with advanced segmentation and predictive and
statistical analytics.
• Integrated platform — Use core Business Intelligence tools and information
infrastructure including reports, metadata and security.
Our products in this category include BusinessObjects Application
Foundation, BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, BusinessObjects Performance
Manager and BusinessObjects Set Analysis.
Business Objects Analytic Applications
Business Objects Analytic Applications provide pre-packaged metrics, reports
and analytics covering customers, products and services, supply chain, human
resource and finance functions. These applications contain best practices
for business analysis and are supported by a customizable framework that
enables them to be adapted to the unique needs of each customer.
Business Objects Analytic Applications provide organizations with the
following benefits:
• Comprehensive suite — These analytical applications are focused on
customers, products and services, supply chain, human resources and finance.
These applications are supported by powerful analytic engines which provide
for segmentation, alerting and predictive analysis.
• Analytics — Guided analysis provides insight into user driven business
questions, then intuitively navigates to the next relevant business
question. Each analytic application contains prepackaged metrics and
analysis techniques, allowing organizations to better understand trends and
business drivers such as customer churn, product profitability and supply
chain effectiveness.
• Flexibility — Analytic applications are built on the core BI tools and
information infrastructure and are designed to be customizable and
extensible.
Our products in this category include BusinessObjects Analytics,
BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence, BusinessObjects Product and Service
Intelligence and Crystal Applications.
Data Integration
Business Objects Data Integration
Business Objects Data Integration drives the process of extracting data from
disparate sources, transforming and loading it into data marts and
warehouses. Delivering data in batch and real time, enterprise-class data
integration helps accelerate Business Intelligence deployments and provides
metadata management and impact analysis across the Business Intelligence
environment.
Business Objects Data Integration helps provide organizations with the
following benefits:
• Productive environment — Easy administration from a single graphical tool
enabled with high-productivity workflows that integrate more data in less
time.
• Powerful extraction, transformation and loading (“ETL”) — High performance
parallel architecture that can simplify complex integration and deliver data
in batch and real time, with the industry’s leading ERP connectivity
support.
• Complete integration — Reduces time to value and total cost of ownership
by tightly integrating the metadata between data integration products and
the Business Intelligence platform to provide an integrated, end-to-end
Business Intelligence environment.
Our products in this category include BusinessObjects Data Integrator and
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts.
Services
We believe that, in addition to our product offerings, our service and
support organization is a critical component to our success.
Post-Sales Customer Support and Software Maintenance. Our worldwide network
of customer support centers (Americas — San Jose, Lake Mary and Atlanta, USA
and Vancouver, Canada; Europe — Maidenhead and Ealing, United Kingdom; and
Asia/ Pacific — Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia) are staffed by highly
trained support engineers who answer customer inquiries by telephone and
email. In 2003, the San Jose and Atlanta support centers earned the
prestigious Support Center Practices Certification that recognizes the high
quality and consistency of Business Objects customer support organization.
This award is presented by Service and Support Professionals Association and
is based on a stringent set of performance standards and best practices for
delivering world-class technology support. All customer support centers are
equipped with a global case tracking system, and a knowledge base and
problem reporting system designed to enable engineers to share their
knowledge and experience, improve the quality of responses to customers, and
reduce response time for customer inquiries. Business Objects’ value-added
resellers, systems integrators, consulting partners and distributors,
supported by Business Objects’ regional support centers, also provide
technical support.
We offer three levels of customer support programs, Standard, Elite and
Premium Support, to better meet customers’ needs. All registered support
customers who are on a current maintenance plan have access 24 hours a day,
seven days a week to our online customer support websites. Online support
provides customers with access to up-to-date technical information and helps
customers independently resolve inquiries. Customers can query multiple
technical repositories to find a solution to their inquiries, participate in
online forums to discuss their Business Intelligence strategies or issues
with other users, download service packs and documentation, or log a case
directly from the site to their local support center. Elite and Premium
customers are assigned a specific team of customer advocates who focus on
the customer’s individual deployment and provide extended service hours.
Software maintenance releases and post-sales technical support are provided
to customers for an annual maintenance fee, which is charged in addition to
the initial product license fee.
Customer Education and Training. We offer a comprehensive education and
training program to customers and third-party consultants who support our
products. Our education services assist customers in getting the most value
out of their Business Intelligence investment. The approach starts with a
training program to plan for maximizing business value by training both
information technology personnel and end users through the appropriate
education services and delivery options, as well as providing the right
services for continuous on-demand learning. This comprehensive plan enables
each audience to obtain the knowledge and skills needed to minimize training
time, maximize solution capabilities and increase overall business value.
Education services offers training via standard or customized courses
delivered through classroom and/or on-site training, as well as virtual
classrooms delivered via webcasts. In 2003, we launched Knowledge
Accelerator, a web-based learning solution. Knowledge Accelerator can be
customized to meet the specific needs of end users of different skill levels
within an organization. It allows customers to quickly deploy out-of-the-box
training and performance support on a variety of our products via their
intranet or server, or on a compact disc.
As users become proficient with our products, they can benefit from
continuous learning on a variety of topics to keep up with the evolution of
the products and continue to maximize the value they get from Business
Intelligence. These courses are offered as a series of webcasts on specific
topics such as technical updates, migration training, optimization best
practices and custom sessions.
Consulting Services. Our consulting services provide expertise in the
design, development and deployment of enterprise Business Intelligence
systems that meet the technical and business requirements of its customers.
Our consulting resources are located in major countries around the world and
we supplement our resources with third-party certified consulting partners.
With in-depth knowledge of enterprise Business Intelligence systems,
reporting, enterprise performance management, analytic applications and data
integration, our consultants ensure that customers can quickly benefit from
the business value that Business Intelligence systems provide.
To help customers succeed with their Business Intelligence initiatives, we
invested heavily in the development of a comprehensive approach toward
Business Intelligence deployments: the Business Intelligence Solution
Accelerator. This methodology integrates technical and strategic consulting,
life cycle learning and post implementation support to provide customers
with a flexible deployment strategy. Our consultants have implemented
Business Intelligence systems in multiple vertical markets. Consulting
services are generally charged to customers on a per consultant per day
basis.
Industry Background
Organizations of every size need to analyze and assess their performance
quickly and effectively. As a result, every organization has a fundamental
and widespread need for useful information. The burden on organizations to
make more effective use of information is growing rapidly in today’s
environment, which is characterized by increasing data volume, uncertain
economic trends, intensified competition and heightened legislative and
regulatory requirements for data collection, reporting and disclosure.
Organizations have spent billions of dollars implementing relational
databases and software systems to efficiently capture, organize, store and
protect data that measures their performance, including customer sales,
expenses, inventory management and employee data. However, often these
systems do not effectively address the needs of business end users to access
this information to make business decisions. As a result, there is a basic
need to access, analyze, understand and deliver information more effectively
within and among organizations, in order to allow them to improve
performance.
A broad category of software known as Business Intelligence has been
developed to help organizations address the need to transform the
organizations’ growing amount of data into useful information.
Organizations have typically deployed Business Intelligence products that
are custom developed or purchased as stand-alone products in a specific
department or for an individual project. This approach has resulted in a
proliferation of products and systems that are often not integrated with
each other or with existing enterprise systems and, as a result, only
provide a fragmented view of the overall business. Many of these products
and systems are costly and complex to maintain and support. In addition,
many Business Intelligence products are designed primarily for sophisticated
analytical users and are difficult for the non-technical user to master.
Most non-technical users require intuitive and seamless access to data as
part of their regular work tasks, regardless of where the data is stored in
an organization.
To allow broad user access to data within and among organizations and to
maximize those organizations’ return on investment, a Business Intelligence
product should meet a range of complex needs. A Business Intelligence
product should integrate data from disparate systems and applications, scale
to support large numbers of users and offer flexible reporting that is easy
to use and provides a full range of presentation, interactivity and
analysis. We believe there is a significant opportunity to provide
organizations with a comprehensive Business Intelligence software approach
that meets the needs of all types of enterprises and all types of users. In
order to accomplish this objective, we believe Business Intelligence
products should serve as an underlying information infrastructure that
allows every user to access information in a form appropriate for the user.
Business Strategy
Our business strategy is focused on three key Business Intelligence
opportunities:
Lead the Market in Enterprise Standardization. Companies are beginning to
select a standard Business Intelligence solution for their enterprise and we
believe this is a significant business opportunity. As enterprises realize
the benefits of deploying Business Intelligence software, they often look to
standardize on a single enterprise-wide solution that can maximize their
return on investment. To capitalize on this opportunity, we have designed
our software to be used throughout the enterprise by the maximum number of
users with the intention of enabling companies to obtain all the components
necessary for their Business Intelligence deployment from a single supplier.
Capitalize on the Growing Demand for Enterprise Performance Management. EPM
is the combination of Business Intelligence, metrics and methodologies to
improve enterprise performance. EPM has become a significant force in the
market due to a number of factors. The recent economic downturn highlighted
managements’ need to use operational dashboards to help their companies more
closely monitor their performance. There is a general increase in demand for
financial transparency and control. There is pressure for companies to show
a real return on their investments in Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”)
and Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) systems. While the concepts of
EPM are not new, the ability of companies to implement EPM applications is
finally possible. Today, the enabling infrastructure of data warehouses and
ERP and CRM systems are in place to make EPM meaningful. We believe that we
are well-positioned to take advantage of the market interest in EPM
applications.
Address Demand by Developers for Embedded Business Intelligence
Functionality. A significant component of our business, strengthened by our
acquisition of Crystal Decisions, is the use of Business Intelligence
technology embedded within other enterprise software applications. Customers
of numerous independent software vendors (“ISVs”) require that the ISVs
offer reporting functionality as an embedded complement to the ISV’s primary
software applications. Corporate application developers often need to embed
reports into custom applications and require the use of object-oriented
reporting technology to efficiently address the need. We believe the
third-party and custom application market to be strong and one in which we
are well positioned to be successful.
Competition
The market for our Business Intelligence software is highly competitive,
rapidly evolving and subject to rapidly changing technology. We compete
principally with providers of Business Intelligence software, analytic
applications, query and reporting software, extraction, transformation and
loading software and data warehousing software. Our competitors, which are
primarily focused on selling Business Intelligence products, include Actuate
Corporation, Ascential Software Corporation,
Cognos Incorporated, Hyperion
Solutions Corporation (which acquired Brio Software, Inc. in 2003),
Informatica Corporation, Information Builders,
MicroStrategy, Inc.. and the SAS Institute. We also compete with large software companies, including
suppliers of enterprise application software encompassing both ERP and CRM,
such as Microsoft Corporation,
Oracle Corporation,
PeopleSoft, Inc., SAP AG and
Siebel Systems, Inc. A number of our
competitors and potential competitors have significantly greater financial
and other resources than we have, which may enable them to address new
competitive opportunities more effectively than us. In addition, some of our
competitors, particularly companies that offer relational database
management software systems and ERP software systems, have well-established
relations with some of our existing and targeted customers.
We believe that the principal competitive factors that impact the market we
serve include: price, performance, scalability, ease of use, functionality,
product architecture, product quality and reliability, scope of
distribution, customer support, name recognition and the scope of product
offering. We believe that we are successfully addressing each of these
competitive factors. Nonetheless, we expect to face increasing competitive
pressures from both current and future competitors in the markets we serve.
Ticker
BOBJ
Business Intelligence
Companies in the Directory
Business Objects
Cognos
Hyperion Solutions
Informatica
MicroStrategy
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