Intelligent Enterprise

Sweeten the pot; keep the price low. That seems to be the continuing strategy for SAP's BusinessObjects Edge line of business intelligence packages aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Each new release adds more functionality from the company's flagship BusinessObjects XI platform. With the 3.1 upgrade announced today, for example, the Edge series gains the search-meets-BI query capabilities of the Polestar interface. SAP is also throwing in pre-built integrations to various Oracle applications.

BusinessObjects Edge packages are aimed at companies with 100 to 1,000 employees and $100 million to $1 billion in revenue. The Standard package, which starts at $19,000 for five concurrent users, includes reporting, query and analysis capabilities. Also available are upgrades that add support for data integration (extract, transform, load and drill-down analysis) and full data management (the integration elements plus data parsing, cleansing and address synchronization).

Until today, Polestar ad hoc query was only available with the enterprise-oriented BusinessObjects XI platform. But in many ways, this interface is ideally suited to SMB environments.

"Midsize companies have very limited IT budgets," points out Jeff Stiles, senior vice president of small- and midsized-enterprise marketing at SAP. "To be able to deliver business intelligence broadly, you need to have tools that are easy to learn, and that's the essence of Polestar."

From the Polestar interface, an untrained user can enter a few keywords -- just as they would in an Internet search engine -- to find related data sets, reports, dashboards and even text-centric documents. Users can then drill into the most appropriate information available from the list of possibilities.

With an eye on the competition, SAP is enhancing BusinessObjects Edge 3.1 with prebuilt Oracle integration kits for Oracle eBusiness Suite as well as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel applications. Also new is an updated .Net development kit and support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SharePoint Server 2008. Similar prebuilt integrations to SAP are already included in Edge for current SAP customers.

"The whole philosophy is to package and price to add value, and many of these shops are looking to add access to third-party environments as well as SAP business applications," Stiles says.

Today's announcement also includes enterprise performance management (EPM) options, specifically new Strategy Management and Planning and Consolidation applications packaged and priced specifically for Edge customers. Edge Strategy Management is $22,500 per 10 users and is aimed at helping SMBs improve performance by connecting goals, initiatives, dashboards and metrics with larger corporate strategies. Edge Planning and Consolidation, which is $30,000 per 10 users, is designed for collaborative budgetary planning as well as quarterly and annual financial close activities.

SAP says the EPM applications will help the Edge SMB offerings competitively stand apart from Microsoft's BI platform built around Microsoft SQL Server and Excel. Microsoft recently de-emphasized performance management by abandoning future development of its PerformancePoint Server, which provided deep planning capabilities as well as the promise (now less likely to be realized) of third-party EPM applications.

"I can't comment on why Microsoft is choosing to not focus on areas such as financial consolidation," Stiles says. "But it opens up the playing field a bit and we see an opportunity within the SAP customer base and beyond."

With the BusinessObjects Edge BI 3.0 upgrade released last year, SAP added mobile device (Blackberry, Symbian, Windows and J2EE) support from BusinessObjects XI and integration capabilities for building data-mart-like SAP "Rapid Marts."