Panorama Business Intelligence

Most of our readers know that Panorama is a SAP partner; however what you many of you may not be aware is that we are also a partner of Business Objects through an OEM we have with BOBJ powering some of their OLAP front end capabilities that require MDX (BOBJ has always been focused on relational and does not have a good in-house solution for OLAP platforms such as SQL Analysis services and SAP BW).

As a partner to both companies, I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of each of these vendors, as well as the new value of the combined offering as well as things to look out for.

SAP strengths prior to the deal:

• SAP offered a good data warehouse and BI platform for their Business Suite applications
• 14,000 customers use NetWeaver BI
• Growing satisfaction of capabilities in the latest version of NetWeaver BI for power users.

SAP weaknesses prior to the deal:

• Ability to easily access and bring in data from non-SAP sources
• Front end – focused on power users so still complex and hard to use
• Unable to sell BI to non-SAP customers

Business Objects strengths prior to the deal:

• Completeness of stack
• Largest BI company
• Brand recognition
• Number of customers
• Healthy revenue

Business Objects weaknesses prior to the deal:

• Weak OLAP support for SAP and Microsoft BI platforms
• Performance
• Complexity of deployment and management of Universe
• Acts as an additional platform in environments that chose their BI platform (BW, Essbase…)

As you can understand the 2 companies have different gaps that the other company does not solve:

• SAP NetWeaver customers won’t find a product in the BOBJ stack that will help them get their Queries into the hands of end users
• SAP NetWeaver customers won’t find new ways to improve performance or optimize their infoCubes
• BOBJ Customers won’t get a powerful OLAP solution they can use with their BOBJ stack
• BOBJ Customers won’t find it any easier to deploy BI or gain performance improvements of their existing solution

So what does this mean for customers?

If you are an SAP NetWeaver customer and are not happy with the BEx suite for your BI needs don’t count on Business Objects to be your solution anytime soon and you will still have to look for a better fit for NetWeaver.

If you are a Business Objects customer you probably won’t really feel any change in the next couple of years aside for their ability to sell you new applications such as Cartesis, Outlooksoft and a few others. Don’t count on BOBJ to introduce a new OLAP engine to your suite.