eWeek - December 15, 2008

in SAAS push

SAP company rolls out bI Ondemand into highly
competitive space

By Clint Boulton While the XI suite comprises apps cus-
Business Objects spent 18 tomers install on their own servers and
years leading the market PCs (on-premises), Business Objects hosts
for business intelligence BI OnDemand on its own servers, provi-
software, applications that sioning the associated apps to customers
help knowledge workers over the Internet as required. This is the
and executives gain greater understand- hallmark of cloud computing—allowing
ing of the market behavior and business users to procure software service over
context of their users. the Web without clogging up their own
Now part of SAP in the wake of a $6.8 hardware and storage.
billion acquisition last year, the BI com- Indeed, the shift to the cloud popular-
pany hopes to extend its lead in SAAS ized by Salesforce.com, Amazon Web
(software as a service) BI as well. Services and Google’s App Engine leads
Business Objects Dec. 10 released a to great opportunities for a company
new version of its BI OnDemand software such as Business Objects. Enterprises typi-
with new content creation and develop- cally employ a hybrid of on-premises
ment capabilities and an accelerator for and on-demand applications for their
SAAS CRM (customer relationship man- workers, partners and customers. Deriv-
agement) power Salesforce.com. ing BI from these disparate data sources
BI OnDemand is essentially a version is a challenge, so BI OnDemand enables
of the company’s flagship Business- customers to share reports and dash-
Objects XI suite, which includes applica- boards that include both on-premises
tionsforperformancemanagement,plan- and on-demand data, said Mani Gill,
ning, reporting, query and analysis, and vice president of Business Objects’ OnDe-
enterprise information management. mand business.

For example, Gill said the new content ness Objects’ servers, which can be creationanddevelopmentenvironment combined with data from other on-helps companies that complain of having demand and on-premises sources. This limited visibility into their sales pipeline. lets customers migrate large amounts

The new version of BI OnDemand lets of data and prepare it for reports, ad customers search on-premises and on- hoc reporting and dashboards, Gill demand data sources to create the said. reports needed to see the entire pipeline BI OnDemand is offered in a monthly to save time and cut administration costs. recurring subscription model. For a typi-

Business users can just type in a keyword cal midmarket implementation with 75 to find the data they need for a certain users and 100GB of storage, the aver-report and make it available within the age cost per user per month would be data warehouse for future reports. about $107 over two years. For a typical

“We’ve created technology that lets large enterprise implementation with you easily tap into that information that’s 1,500 users and 500GB of storage, the sitting all over the place,” Gill said, adding average cost per user per month would that Business Objects also licenses third- be about $47 over two years. ´ party data from Dun & Bradstreet and Thomson Reuters for its BI OnDemand software.

Trends in SAAS

Gartner expects a big jump in spending on

Moreover, the absence of BI support for large Salesforce.com data sets has challenged customers who need to dive deeper into their Salesforce data and combine it with data from other applications.