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BOBJ announced their results and Sent Shares South by over 12%; only 10% of Customers Have Upgraded to XI2         usiness Objects announced its quarterly profit fell 18% as expenses, including those for stock options, rose to more than offset a 12% increase in revenue.     According to SG Cowen, “We Remain Cautiously Pessimistic. We believe fundamentals at BOBJ are 100% tied to the current XI product cycle. Our FY06 earnings model is predicated on the assumption that this is the year BOBJ sales reps sell back into loyal accounts that have been starved for product for years. While XIr2 product cycle may be two years long, we expect preponderance of license sales to be closed in FY06, putting growth in FY07 at material risk. Three other factors also worry us:  1. SI partners continue to grumble about encroachment from BOBJ's Services arm, which appears to be alienating an important part of the ecosystem. Co will have a hard time driving rev growth if partners start moving away from BOBJ to other BI vendors.   2. Despite co's comments on growth from the SRC acquisition, we aren't hearing about it in the field. If co doesn't plant Performance Management seeds as it sells XIr2, it's going to be hard to harvest that revenue stream next year.  3. ORCL's BI efforts have had new life breathed into them with Siebel Analytics, SAP's mediocre offering has the benefit of a massive installed base, and MSFT continues to provide the low cost alternative.â€�    

Comment  

They should also be worried about the fact that customers are slow to migrate..According to (see above) BOBJ CEO, only 10% of BOBJ customers have taken on the cost and expense of migration. 

First Signs of Integration of Crystal Live Office and Crystal Xcelsius – Crystal Vision Product Line     usiness Objects unveiled Crystal Vision and Crystal Vision Server, reporting software for individuals and midsized companies, respectively. They let users create reports and business intelligence dashboards and use the produced information within Microsoft Office applications. Crystal Vision Server, which includes the SME Crystal Server offering, Xcelsius, and Live Office will be available later this month, with Crystal Vision priced at $795 per user and Crystal Vision Server priced at $12,500.    

Comments 

• This introduction is essentially a first cut at integration between Crystal Reports / Crystal Xcelsius / LiveOffice 
• While these products may be of interest to a SME as point solutions for reports and dashboards, they essentially exclude the adoption of the BOBJ XI2 platform by these companies due to complexity: (1) These products are still not fully integrated with the BOBJ XI2 platform, Crystal still requires its own metadata, Business Views to create a Business Objects Universe in the majority of cases, which results in duplicate metadata layers and threatens single source of truth; (2) now a BOBJ user has to choose between dashboards and gauges that are part of BOBJ Performance Manager and BOBJ Analytics, or Crystal Vision.

Where you wondering why Business Objects acquired EII vendor, Medience and data quality vendor, FirstLogic? Business Objects’ Reveals its EIM Strategy 

mid much hoopla, Business Objects announced new products, services, and partnerships for enterprise information management (EIM). According to BOBJ, EIM provides customers with a strategy to ensure that their information is accurate and current.     In a strategy shift, Business Objects turns its focus to back end integration and infrastructure, a proven loosing strategy for fellow niche player, Informatica. A source at the company said "we're investing heavily in the information that underpins BI [and] becoming more of an information management vendor rather than one purely focused on the BI side". This move puts Business Objects squarely in competition with Oracle, IBM and of course, Informatica, which tried and failed at a bifurcated front end/back end strategy.     "Reports and dashboards are only as good as the data that populates them," said Philip Russom, senior manager of research at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). "Complete, clean, and auditable data for reporting and analysis requires software tools for data integration, data quality, and data lineage -- not to mention reporting and analysis tools -- all tied together through a common metadata layer. You can buy these tools from multiple vendors, then work through a risky and time-consuming system integration project. Or you can get them all from Business Objects, pre-integrated according to a sound EIM strategy." Or you can get the complete stack, including the database and data hubs from Oracle, a leader in EIM.    

Key Elements of the Strategy  

Business Objects offers data integration, metadata management, and data quality products, plus a suite of “EIMâ€� professional services.    

Virtual and Physical Data Integration  

BOBJ announced the general availability of a new product for enterprise information integration (EII), BusinessObjects Data Federator XI. This new product provides customers with a virtual, real-time view of their disparate data sources. This is the rebranded Medience product.      

Metadata Visibility  

Business Objects introduces BusinessObjects Metadata Manager XI, a new product that collects and unifies BI, ETL, relational databases, and third-party metadata. Metadata Manager gives administrators complete visibility into all metadata so they can view, analyze, and explore metadata relationships and business rules. The new product also allows IT managers to better understand the impact of source data changes across the entire BI environment. Metadata Manager provides enhanced data lineage capabilities that help organizations deliver trusted information for compliance reporting and internal controls.    

Data Quality  

On April 1st Business Objects completed its acquisition of Firstlogic, Inc. Business Objects will continue to deliver data quality products for name parsing, address enhancement, and consolidation as part of the data integration platform. Additionally, Business Objects now provides standalone data quality and data assessment solutions to profile, cleanse, and monitor data.    New Global Services Deliver EIM Solutions   Business Objects also announced a family of strategic EIM service offerings ranging from data quality and integration through enterprise data warehousing. These offerings are designed to help customers evaluate their current information management challenges, develop a customized EIM strategy, and create best practices to ensure customer success. For example, the EIM Vision Workshop provides a comprehensive overview and critique of customers' EIM environment and delivers a roadmap that addresses their unique business goals. Global services can also help customers with a Data Quality Assessment offering, which determines the state of customer data and their requirements for EIM.    All the new products are available immediately. Pricing for Data Federator starts at $30,000 per CPU, while pricing for Metadata Manager ranges from $45,000 to $120,000 per BI deployment.  Only 10% of BOBJ Customers have Moved to XI; Why Stay??     hief executive John Schwarz estimated that "substantially less than 10 percent" of the vendor's 37,000 customers have already moved to the new toolset.     Vice-president of product marketing Donald McCormick, speaking to the press at Business Objects user conference in Cannes, admitted that basing the suite on Crystal Decisions' architecture had made it tricky for some Business Objects customers to upgrade.     John Schwarz said this complexity helped to explain why some firms have been slow to upgrade. He said 15 percent of Crystal customers had made the move in the past 15 months, and a small percentage of Business Objects' customers had made the transition.     However, the company said the launch of BusinessObjects XI Release 2 last November had made technical migration simpler for Business Objects customers. The vendor added that it had invested heavily in services teams to help customers migrate quickly and easily.     Schwarz insisted this message is now reaching customers, and in a recent survey of 1,000 customers, 70 percent said they wanted to move to BusinessObjects XI in the next 18 to 24 months. 

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n absence of its own BPM solution, Cognos partners with Pegasystems, a provider of unified process and rules technology. There is very little detail around the nature of this partnership, so it is likely to be a marketing partnership only. None-the-less, the announcement confirms a BPM hole in Cognos product stack / story, which is a significant area of strength for Oracle and is a key part of its Fusion Middleware value proposition. 

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ccording to Gartner, there is a general and significant trend where many of the primarily pure-play business intelligence (BI) vendors now sell and support industry-specific analytic applications and corporate performance management (CPM) tools, especially in banking and financial services, where many have sold horizontal applications.     Findings From the 'Business Intelligence and Performance Management' Research Meeting: Ensure That Industry Analytic Applications Are Not 'Industry Generic'. Vendors need deep experience with a wide variety of environments (in this case, bank branches) to produce tools that accurately measure the correct factors for determining performance in a particular situation. "Cookie-cutter templates" are rarely the optimal solution, and accepting even a skilled and trusted nonstakeholder's view of what is important may lead to dangerously suboptimal performance.     Organizations seeking highly specialized industry-specific performance management and analytic applications should be wary of newly launched products that are given an "industry-specific" label. Conduct due diligence to ensure that a particular solution touted as industry specific is suited for your segment of a given industry. This is particularly important when reviewing analytic and CPM tools targeted at broad industry categories. Industry designations such as "banking" or "retail" are often generalizations, are too broad to be of particular use and usually omit specific needs arising from the market subsegment, geography, and regulatory and cultural needs that are invisible not only to outsiders, but to many insiders who are not intimately involved with them on a daily basis.  Labeling a product "industry specific" does not mean that it meets comprehensive, specific requirements for every aspect of an industry. Consider the unique segment in which your company operates, and use your requirements to select the best solution. 

Cognos 

• Cognos Delays Filing; Shares Drop 11% 
• Cognos Unveils New Performance Solutions for Financial Management, Financial Services and Life Sciences 
• Cognos Unveils New Performance Solutions for Financial Management, Financial Services and Life Sciences 
• Gartner Urges Caution When Considering Vertical Offerings from Best of Breed BI Vendors 
• Pegasystems Partners With Cognos; Needs BPM

Cognos Delays Filing; Shares Drop 11% 

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ognos shares fell 11 percent before the bell on May 16, 2006, a day after the company said it would delay filing the annual report for its recent fiscal year.      In spite of Cognos’s recent high profile announcements around Search, SOA, and Performance Management in recent weeks, continued uncertainty remains around uptake of Cognos 8 given significant migration challenges and essentially new product pricing for upgrades.     Cognos Unveils New Performance Solutions for Financial Management, Financial Services and Life Sciences    

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ognos announced the new blue print offerings listed below.  Cognos claims blue prints include data models, implementation templates and best practices for specific solutions.    

• Management and Financial Reporting (MFR) provides a pre-built library of easy to configure performance reports 
• International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Performance Blueprints addresses the move by the European Commission to establish common regulatory and accounting standards 
• Cognos Close, Consolidate and Report (CCR) Performance Blueprint developed in partnership with Deloitte and Touche, provides a template for the consolidation and closing process.  Deloitte has itemized 30 financial control objectives linked to the framework established by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO), a private sector organization dedicated to improving the quality of financial reporting. 
• The new Financial Services blue print in conjunction with 3^rd party activity based costing vendor, Acorn Systems, is intended to help retail banks optimize branch profitability. Acorn System's Profit Analyzer, like Oracle’s newly released Profitability Analyzer, uniquely assigns general ledger costs and resources through business processes to precisely determine the baseline cost and profitability of individual customers, segments, channels, branches, products and even transactions, based on historical performance. 
• Clinical trial forecasting blue print allows drug companies to better anticipate clinical trial resource requirements and accompanying expenses.  The second module will give companies the ability to build optimal sample distribution strategies that take into account current market conditions, field level information, inventory plans, and other corporate goals. 

   Cognos emphasizes the following differentiators: 

• Driver-based planning for more granular management of key revenue and expense lines 
• Flexible initiative planning to better mobilize new product introductions, marketing campaigns and other initiatives (branch-level for Financial Services) 
• Position-level staff planning for strong headcount expenditure control (branch in Financial Services Offering) 
• Break-back functionality to automatically pro-rate revenues, margins or costs to meet goals 
• What-if' modeling and analysis to best determine the impact of decisions using multiple scenarios 
• Intuitive dashboards to monitor and analyze performance indicators at various levels…No doubt this is provided through an additional purchased of ReportNet..Planning can be a data source for ReportNet reports.. 

• Integrated workflow capabilities to facilitate enterprise collaboration and accountability 

   Cognos says these blue prints are based on the proven reporting and analysis capabilities of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and the enterprise financial consolidation and corporate reporting capabilities of Cognos 8 Controller.

Move Over Pentaho; JasperSource to Release a BI Suite JasperReports last year was commercialized by JasperSoft Corp. (the former Panscopic), which bundled a report authoring client (iReport), a portal-based, embeddable reporting engine (JasperDecisions), and other complementary enhancements with the vanilla JasperReports library.  At the MySQL conference, JasperSoft announced an open source BI suite, JasperIntelligence, which the company says it will roll out over the next few months.      * JasperSoft’s new JasperServer deliverableâ€�BI server middleware is available in both commercial and open-source variants. JasperIntelligence components include JasperReports, along with JasperDesigner (an open-source report design tool), JasperETL, and JasperDecisions. As for the new JasperServer deliverable, it’s written in Java and supports PHP, Perl, Python and other scripting languages.     * JasperServer can generate reports in most common formats, including HTML, PDF, Excel and Word. It uses HTTP, SOAP, Web services, and Java APIs to communicate with other applications, and can retrieve data using JDBC, POJO and XML.     * JasperAnalytics will support slicing and dicing, pivoting, filtering, charting, and drill-down.  It is an open-source Java deliverable.  JasperSoft, which estimates about 10,000 deployments of its software, intends to make money by charging for high-end versions of its open-source tools and by offering support services.  According to MySQL AB’s own polling, JasperReports is the most popular reporting engine for the MySQL database, used by about 40 percent of all MySQL shops within the MySQL community.

Teradata sets up global consulting or in India Teradata has established its global consulting center in India, comprising specialists who will serve as the essential Data Warehouse (DW)/Business Intelligence (BI) Center of Excellence (CoE) for Teradata customers in more than 15 countries. This is the third CoE established by Teradata, the other two being in Pakistan and China. According to a Teradata statement, its global consulting centre India will be a key enabler of knowledge re-use and will act as a clearinghouse for Field-Based-Development (FBD) assets and applications for global enterprises. Designed to provide data warehousing and related capacity to field professional services organizations, it will acquire, adapt and disseminate consulting services best practices around the world. The India center will house 15-20 per cent of all Teradata Professional Services staff that will support 80 per cent of all consulting engagements in the Americas and Asia-Pacific. Comments * This may give Teradata a greater ability to discount on services when using these centers in the project.

IBM releases WebSphere Product Center 5.3  WebSphere Product Center (WPC) 5.3 is product information management software that assists users in developing and managing a central repository of master data information. The new version includes a Java API and Web services that can be layered on top of the middleware to facilitate integration with SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications. The software also comes with better search capabilities and improved product location management. The ability to model location in the hierarchy is new in 5.3.  Users can use the new features to more quickly find product information specific to a particular region or store.   IBM acquired the technology behind WPC in 2004 with the purchase of a business partner Trigo Technologies, which had a product information management offering called Product Center. IBM rebranded the Trigo software as a WebSphere product, bringing out a new version of the offering, version 5.2, last year. Another IBM master data management module, WebSphere Customer Center, is based on technology the vendor acquired last year when it bought data integration software company DWL.