Panorama's Perspective on the SAP Acquisition of Business Objects

SAP recently announced its plans to acquire Business Objects for $6.8 Billion. Panorama Software is a leading provider of Proactive Business Intelligence (PBI) software for the SAP BI platform. We are both a Powered by NetWeaver and Certified Integration partner of SAP, and beyond these designations, our R&D maintains a close working relationship with the NetWeaver development team in Walldorf. Panorama also has an OEM agreement with Business Objects, providing OLAP BI capabilities. These two strategic relationships uniquely position Panorama. We have been following and analyzing this announcement closely and would like to share our perspectives on the market impact of this acquisition, but more importantly try to help SAP customers understand when they should or shouldn’t consider Panorama.

A year of change in the BI market

It goes without saying that 2007 has been a year of great many changes in the business intelligence market. As with any mature market comes consolidation, but more importantly there is also innovation and opportunity. Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion and now SAP’s acquisition of Business Object demonstrate that the demand and growing importance of BI and CPM solutions. And while the industry experts seem divided as to future impact on the market from such activities, history shows that consolidation takes time and do not always benefit customers.

Panorama differentiates itself from other BI vendors by having built a product that was developed specifically for the SAP NetWeaver BI (BW) platform. There are approximately 14,000 users of NetWeaver BI (BW) worldwide, most of which claim to use BEx for their power users but struggle with tools that provide information workers with self service reporting and analytics. Panorama has been focused on extending BEx by working natively on top of NetWeaver BI. Our unique focus is on enabling information workers across the enterprise to explore and interact with data from NetWeaver BI InfoCubes and InfoQueries.

In contrast companies such as Business Objects replace the SAP NetWeaver BI platform and BEx tools with their own platform – the Business Objects Universe. This strategy has yet to be widely adopted as very few SAP customers actually use Business Objects on top of NetWeaver BI (BW). In the long term, SAP may be able to convince their customers to move away from NetWeaver; however Panorama solves the BI challenges faced by SAP customers today. Companies have spent millions on deploying and optimizing NetWeaver BI and want solutions that take leverage these investments.

Who should choose Panorama NovaView

SAP customers that have invested in NetWeaver BI (BW) and want to maximize that investment
SAP customer that use BEx and want to extend the reach and use of SAP BEx queries
SAP customers that want to provide end-users the ability to analyze data and create their own reports from NetWeaver BI (BW)
SAP customers that want to builds powerful executive dashboards from InfoQueries and InfoCubes.
SAP customers that use both NetWeaver BI and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services
Customers looking for a complete suite of BI applications for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services
Customers that want to improve NetWeaver BI and SQL Server Analysis Services platform performance

Who should choose Business Objects?

Non SAP customers that have no standard BI platform
SAP customers that are not invested in NetWeaver BI (BW)
SAP customers that are invested in NetWeaver BI but are ready to move an alternative platform
Companies that want to completely replace BEx
Customers that rely mostly on relational data and don’t care about OLAP

Differences between solutions from Panorama and Business Objects

Business Objects	Panorama
Replaces NetWeaver® as the main data platform	Keeps NetWeaver® as the main platform for SAP
Replaces BEx completely	Extends and co-exists with BEx
Focuses on power users that want to replace BEX and Query designer	Focuses on end user by EXTENDING the use of BEX and Query designer
Mostly designed for reporting on SAP data	Mostly designed for interactive analytics on SAP data
Have a solution that works against several platforms only one being SAP	Designed for NetWeaver® BI
When working against SAP BW require the introduction of an additional metadata layer onto which data will be extracted to from info cubes and Bex Queries	Does leverage 100% of your investment in InfoCubes and BEX Queries
Requires months of planning and deployment	Takes days to deploy