Analytic Alliances

New VP at Business Objects seeks more embedded analytics opportunities

Beverly Powell-Goldman is the new group vice president of strategic alliances at BI vendor Business Objects SA. Intelligent Enterprise senior editor Jeanette Burriesci asked her about her plans.

Powell-Goldman: Business Objects has always been a very partner-friendly company and I want to continue that. I plan to look at the alliances the company has today and how they relate to our goal of enlarging the footprint of Business Objects in the overall enterprise software market.

Intelligent Enterprise: Tell us more about that. The company seems to have most of the tier-one ERP vendors covered in the Global Alliance program. Are you also looking at the possibility of gaining a broader presence across ERP vendors' product lines?

Powell-Goldman: Yes, we do have strong relationships already with the ERP vendors. However, we plan to go through a process of determining where there are specific opportunities to strengthen our relationships with these vendors. In general, I see a significant opportunity to embed our analytic technology into their solutions.

When most ERP buying decisions were made, customers assumed they would get powerful analytics as part of the solution. Unfortunately, in reality this has not been the case. By embedding our analytics, we can offer ERP vendors a way to provide added value to their customers. Our goal is to create a win-win solution for Business Objects, our global partners, and, in the end, our joint customers.

One of the natural expansion areas for Business Objects is the enterprise performance management (EPM) space. Successful EPM solutions will be driven from a strategic foundation of BI systems and analytics across the entire organization. By offering a partner-friendly, open solution, we enable our customers to leverage their existing investments in ERP, CRM, SCM [supply chain management], and other enterprise applications to better track, understand, and manage enterprise performance.

From a partnering perspective, we have already started to expand our presence in this area with our recently announced Open Financial Applications Initiative. This is a new global partner program that was created to provide our customers with easy access to data stored in the leading financial applications as part of an overall EPM solution. With the program, we have recently expanded our partnerships with PeopleSoft and Hyperion, and expanded or entered into new alliances with other best-of-breed financial and performance management application providers including ALG Software, Cartesis, Closedloop Solutions, Comshare, Longview Solutions, OutlookSoft, and SRC Software.

Since the financial applications market is already highly penetrated, it was important for us to partner with these leading vendors instead of tying our solution to one proprietary financial application vendor. We feel this will be a significant differentiating factor against our competition and positions Business Objects as a more robust solution.

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