Business Objects launches new product strategy
Business Objects launches new product strategy
Business Objects has announced its new product integration roadmap after its recent acquisition of Crystal Decisions.
Over the past six months, a team of experts from the new combined company met with customers from every major industry, to obtain guidance and feedback in the development of future products plans.
Business Objects also met with leading industry analysts to focus their insights and gather feedback from a balanced, vendor-neutral source. Finally, a joint task force, which consisted of executives, engineers, product managers, marketing managers, and other contributors, refined and validated the roadmap.
Bernard Liautaud, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Business Objects said that his company have always been deeply committed to the success of their customers: "This is why we made customer input the starting point for the development of the product roadmap, and is why we are taking the unusual step of making our long-term product integration roadmap available to the public: http://www.businessobjects.com
We want to provide our customers with visibility into our product plans, and maximum flexibility in how they move forward with our combined product line. To our knowledge, no competitor in the Business Intelligence market provides this level of detail on their product plans."
Phase one of the integration will provide portal integration, common web services API's, and enable Business Objects metadata, or "universes" as an optional data source for Crystal Reports. The company expects to deliver this integration pack in the second quarter of the year.
Phase two will involve platform-level integration. This will support core products from both product lines running on a common infrastructure with common administration. The company expects to deliver platform-level integration by the end of 2004.
Phase three will deliver a superset of all current product functionality on an enhanced, integrated platform. The company expects to deliver complete integration by 2005.
The new Business Objects has leading offerings in enterprise reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, enterprise performance management, data integration, and analytic applications.
It has nearly 4000 employees serving the needs of customers in 80 countries around the world. Over 2300 of these are in customer-facing positions in account management, professional services, and customer support. Over 1000 employees are in product development, making this the business intelligence industry's largest research and development organisation.
Related Article: