“Oracle price-gouges customers even more than we do.”
Although Dennis disagrees with my recollection of the sentence structure.
Update: Dennis now agrees with me, and expands on the context.
Fireside chat with Doug Merritt at Business Objects Summit
Keeping with SAP’s excellent blogger relations, a few of us bloggers had a chance for a quick chat with Doug Merritt about acquisitions in the space, the “walking dead” of BI vendors, popular BI applications, SaaS BI, go-to-market strategies, the transition to being part of SAP, new product segments, selling into big accounts versus mid-market, the challenges of distribution, and recent maintenance fee increases. Interesting stuff.
This is my first Business Objects event, and I’m still getting used to hearing the insiders refer to it as “bob-j” (presumably from the pre-acquisition ticker symbol).
Business Objects Summit: Franz Aman on BI Platform
Franz Aman, VP of Product Marketing, gave us a product roadmap of the BI platform within Business Objects and SAP. Unfortunately, he declared the session as being under NDA, even though a lot of what he talked about had nothing to do with future product directions, so I can’t share it with you.
The true innovation, which I hope that I’m not breaking NDA to report on, is the use of a background gradient that goes from SAP yellow to Business Objects blue in the boxes that represent products jointly developed by SAP and Business Objects:
Shhhh…you didn’t see it here.
Business Objects Summit: Sanjay Poonen
Moving from business intelligence to the applications that rely on business intelligence, we heard from Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications. He started off with the cycle that we saw earlier in the day, with insight being linked to execution and process optimization, and focused on the governance, risk and compliance aspects of this cycle.
He sees business intelligence as a central contributor to EPM, GRC and ERP, and with SAP having a leadership position in all of these, they can provide a total application suite for the CFO. Their product portfolio includes both SAP and Business Objects offerings:
- SAP Strategy Management
- Business Objects Financial Consolidation
- SAP Business Planning and Consolidation
- SAP GRC Process Controls
- Business Objects Profitability and Cost Management
- SAP Spend Analytics
These tools are becoming more collaborative, since almost all situations involving EPM and GRC will require a degree of collaboration between different people within an enterprise, and pull in information from both internal and external sources to create a more complete view of an business situation.
Business Objects Summit: Marge Breya on product portfolio
Marge Breya, EVP and BPM of the Business Intelligence Platform group, gave us a whirlwind briefing on the product portfolio, which is made up of Business Objects assets, some SAP assets, and new products being built jointly:
- Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC), where they hold the overall #1 position worldwide with a 21% market share
- Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), made up of financial performance management (#2 with a 20% share) and operational performance management (#1 with a 23% share), the latter of which includes both standalone and embedded components
- Information Discovery and Delivery, made up of query, reporting and analysis (#1 with a 24% share) and advanced analytics (just introduced)
- Enterprise Information Management (#4)
Not surprisingly, they are pursuing a complete integrated stack with other SAP products, but they also integrate with products from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and independent application and database vendors.
She then introduced John Mayer, director of consulting and testing services at Apotex Group (a pharmaceutical firm), to discuss their use of the products: they’re a big SAP user, and are also using Business Objects in several areas. They’ve been giving the end users tools that they can use to have a view into the corporate data for ad hoc queries, and having seen the value of that, it’s spreading across the organization and helping to drive their data warehouse initiative. IT keeps overall design control over the universes and databases — you don’t really want users doing this since they may not understand the implications of, say, searching on a multi-million record table using an unindexed field — but the users create their own queries and reports.
Breya continued with the message of making this easier for the not-so-technically-minded to create their own queries, reports and dashboards. Their intelligence platform puts a semantic layer over the messy technical stuff (metadata management, master data management, etc.), and creates a common services infrastructure for finding and using those information components as services from the analysis and reporting layer.
They have a large suite of information consumption tools in that query, analysis and reporting layer:
- Crystal Reports (production reports with drillable visualization)
- BI Widgets
- BI Mobile
- Polestar
- Web Intelligence (ad hoc reporting and analysis)
- Text Analytics
- Voyager (OLAP advanced analysis)
- Predictive Workbench (advanced statistical analysis)
Today, they’re announcing a new product in that suite: Xcelsius Present, a data visualization tool. From today’s press release:
Xcelsius Present is a data-visualization tool that transforms ordinary, static Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets into captivating visuals and allows business users to share them via Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe™ PDF files. Through interactive data visualizations and a simple, point-and-click interface, Xcelsius Present enables business users to create professional-looking visuals in just minutes, resulting in engaging experiences for presenters and audiences alike. Using interactive graphics – including dials, charts and gauges that clearly convey business cases and demonstrate “what if” scenarios – business professionals can involve, inform and persuade their audiences in meaningful ways with stunning visualizations.
This is a sub-$200 product, aimed at a broad range of business users who want to add some nice visualizations to their spreadsheet data, but there’s probably also a consumer market for this as well; in fact, one of their online demos is a college cost calculator.
They’re also announcing Crystal Reports Basic for SAP Business One, allowing for easily customizable drillable reporting on SAP Business One data that can be shared with others.
She quickly coverred their data services portfolio, which provides all the usual data management functions but also data federation and management of unstructured data such as RSS feeds.
They provide on-premise solutions, but also have more than 125,000 subscribers for their SaaS BI offerings.
Business Objects Summit: Partner Panel
Narina Sippy, SVP and GM of GRC at Business Objects, hosted a panel of three major partners: Lee Dittmar of Deloitte, Glenn Gutwillig of Accenture, and Dan Miller of IBM GS. Inevitably, this started with the “mine’s bigger than yours” comparisons, because apparently when it comes to Business Objects professional services practices, size does matter.
The most interesting part of the discussion was in response to an audience question about whether it’s possible to reach the nirvana of enterprise-wide information access and sharing, or if we’re stuck with unintegrated silos of information within enterprises. The panel felt that the leaders in moving to enterprise-wide integrated information management will gain such a competitive advantage — compliance, internal collaboration and other benefits — that it will force the rest of the market along quickly behind it.
Business Objects Summit: Day 1 Keynote
I’m here in rainy Boston at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It’s a very process-oriented message (which explains why I’m here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.
He was joined by Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales (moving from a product role), who continued with the message of how total insight allows organizations to optimize business performance. He discussed a number of customer case studies, focusing on how their easy-to-use end-user tools are being used to solve real business problems.
He also showed the strong tie-in between business intelligence to core SAP systems: insight, strategy and decisions feeding into monitoring, process refinement, process execution and events.
It’s only been just over six months since Business Objects’ acquisition by SAP, a period when most acquired companies take a bit of a dip in sales, but they’ve managed to keep their numbers on an upward growth path.
Becher then introduced Dr. Robert Kaplan from Harvard Business School and Palladium Group, inventor of such business strategy and measurement concepts as balanced scorecard and activity-based costing. We’ve also been given a copy of his book, The Execution Premium — Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, which I look forward to reading. He walked us through the main concept in the book: closed-look cycle that links strategy and operations:
- Develop the strategy
- Translate the strategy
- Align the organization
- Plan operations
- Execution
- Monitor and learn
- Test and adapt
In the middle of this cycle are the strategic plan (e.g., balanced scorecard) and the operating plan (e.g., forecasts, budgets, dashboards), with links to the several steps in the cycle that either create the artifacts of the plans or are informed by those artifacts, as well as interacting with each other.
Sep 2 and 3 represent the creation of the balanced scorecard, and translating that into operational improvement programs (step 4) is a new focus in Kaplan’s book. And here we are again, talking about process — since that’s what step 5 is all about — and how balanced scorecard helps to determine which processes have the most impact on a business’ performance, and are therefore the ones that should be the focus of process improvement efforts.
Becher took us back around the cycle, showing how Business Objects is applied at each of those steps (except execution), which provided an interesting perspective on the different roles of Business Objects within cycle that we in the BPM world know as design-execute-monitor-optimize.
I (heart) geeks
Okay, I (heart) one geek in particular, who builds HD OTA antennas out of teaspoons and tape measures, and discusses λ/2 with me as if I remember anything from those long-ago electronics courses. Given the chance to review I Love Geeks: The Official Handbook, I couldn’t resist — although I am very geeky myself, I’m a software geek, and sometimes the mindset of my in-house electrical engineer remains opaque to me. And Friday of a crushingly busy work week seemed a good time for a break for myself and my readers.
The first chapter discusses the evolution of geeks, how the terms “geek” and “nerd” have become mostly interchangeable (not sure that I agree with that — I’m a self-declared geek but would bristle at being called a nerd), and even the etymology of the word “nerd”: it was first used by Dr. Seuss in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, although his use doesn’t appear to be related to the current usage. There’s some discussion of the psychology of a developing geek, and some behaviors to expect from them, both the good and the weird.
The next six chapters each focus on a particular variety of geek: gamers, comic book and graphic novel, manga and anime, film and television, sports, and science fiction and fantasy. Each chapter is a great introduction to that world, giving you a quick background and some key facts: a valuable reference if you want to get into it yourself, or just not sound too clued out when you ask about it.
Some of these — film and television, sports — definitely don’t fall into my definition of geekdom, which has a much more technical direction that the author’s view. In the final chapter, she explains why she hasn’t address that directly:
Wait, what? We’re done? But… but… what about computers and programming? Biochemistry? Physics” Math You know, the actual building blocks of nerd-dom?
Well, here’s the thing: those interests — or rather, fields of study — aren’t so nerdy anymore. The people who study them, on the other hand, probably are, but it’s a sure bet that their interests fall into one of the categories I’ve examined in this book.
I disagree, and think that the book could have included a chapter on the engineering geek who spends his free time tinkering with electronics, a copy of Make magazine at his side, or learning a new RIA programming language just for fun.
I know that my readership is mostly male and mostly geeky, but this would make a great little gift for that woman in your life you often looks at you with a slight frown, one raised eyebrow, and her hand on the 9-1-1 speed dial button. Or, if you have kids who are into anime or video games and you’d like some insight into their world, there’s a chapter in here for you. It’s due out in January, a little late for Christmas but just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, Adams Media, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.
Upcoming conferences
I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following:
- Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there.
- International Conference on BPM, September 1-4, Milan. I’m very excited to be attending this conference since it represents a lot of the academic research going on in BPM, not just what the vendors and analysts have to show. There are some great workshops lined up, such as BPM and social software; interesting sessions; and demos from some of the universities and research labs. You can find last year’s proceedings here.
- The Appian user conference, September 8-10, Washington DC. This is the first time that I’ve attended an Appian conference, and I’m looking forward to seeing what all those new marketing dollars are buying.
- The Gartner BPM summit, September 10-12, Washington DC. I’ve been to enough of these lately that I don’t need to attend the whole summit, but since I’m in DC that week for Appian’s conference, I’m adding one more day for Gartner. I think that it’s pretty clever for Appian to schedule like this: it should drive up attendance at their conference, since Appian customers/partners flying in for Gartner will figure that it’s only a couple of extra days to do both.
- OMG BPM Think Tank, October 6-7, Chicago. I’m on the program committee, and will be leading a roundtable on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM on the first day.
- Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, Orlando. I’ll be giving a presentation on mixing rules and process.
- SAP BPM, November 17-19, Las Vegas. I’m giving a Jumpstart pre-conference session, an introduction to BPM, on the 16th.
Given that I fly everywhere on Star Alliance, this will bump me over the 35,000 miles for the year that gives me Aeroplan Elite status for 2009, without which I really don’t want to fly.
From a disclosure standpoint, my expenses are being paid for the Appian conference, the Business Rules Forum, and two SAP events; for the latter SAP event, I’m also being paid to deliver the half-day training session.
Business Rules Forum
The Business Rules Forum is coming up on October 26-30 in Orlando, and I’ll be back there again this year to speak. You can find my coverage of last year’s event here, and my presentation on BPM, BR and BI is available here. I found last year’s event definitely worthwhile, although I was left with the feeling that we still had a long way to go in terms of creating the necessary about of synergy between BPM and BR. A lot has happened in a year, and this year I’m speaking on mixing rules and process:
There are many techniques for combining rules or decisioning capability with business process management (BPM), ranging from using simple expression engines embedded within a BPM system to a full integration between separate BRM and BPM systems.
This session takes a close look at what rules functionality that the BPM systems offer, and the key characteristics that identify which rules and decisions should remain in the domain of the BPM system, and which should be entrusted to a full-strength business rules management system. What you will will learn:
- The current state of BPM and BRM
- How BPM and BRM interact
- Where your rules belong
You can find the conference brochure/schedule here, and online registration here. The organizers have offered my readers 10% off the conference registration if you use the promotional code 8SPSK when you register, and you can also get an early bird discount if you register by September 19th. I don’t get a referral fee from this, it’s just there as a courtesy for any of you who are interested in attending, although in the spirit of full disclosure, my travel expenses to attend are covered by the conference since I’m a speaker.