One Step Closer…

The associated press just announced that the SAP $6.8 billion purchase of Business Objects has cleared their review. They said that the deal, “would not significantly impede effective competition” in the 27-nation EU… this is on top of the top given by the US which I wrote about earlier.

Click here to read the full Associated Press Announcement

It will be interesting to see how things play out now. Here are a list of the recent large BI aquisitions:

• Oracle buys Hyperion
• SAP buys Business Objects
• IBM buys Cognos

It so funny how things work out. At Business Objects we had the “annual” merger rumors, which have occurred every year for the past 3 years. Who would it be? IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? SAP? HP? even Google? Google - Hmmm that was an interesting one.

I never really thought SAP would buy Business Objects. You see, I’m an SAP Champion, which means that I get involved in a lot of the Business Objects deals around SAP in my region. I’ve always perceived that SAP had a strong “we can build it better” mentality and therefore would never buy us. In addition, we would be so expensive. Since they already had a large set of their own BI tools, would they ever admit that they need something that worked with non-SAP data? They had only made very small acquisitions in the past. It seemed pretty unlikely.

Well, obviously things changed, because they forked over $6.8 billion… that’s a tidy little bit. We were pretty excited when we passed the $1B revenue/year mark at the end of 2006…. (meaning our revenues were more than $250K/quarter). Well in looking over SAP’s financials, they make $1B/quarter. Wow! Business Objects is big for a “BI” company, but we would have a long way to go on our own to reach their size. They say the 2nd billion is always the hardest.

I’d love to share my thoughts about what might happen or what should happen, but I don’t that it would be very valuable to all of you… and besides, they say it’s illegal to talk about the future or express opinions and what could be/should be since we’re still, officially two companies.

Still, I have to say, since joining Crystal Decisions in 2001, it’s been a really fun ride. I came from a smallish company of 120 employees and soon I’ll be working for one of the three largest software companies in the world. This is awesome. God is good.

Deploying BusinessObjects with wdeploy

Deploying BusinessObjects XI on remote web servers just go a whole lot easier!

BusinessObjects has always been easy to install when you take the default settings and do a single server installation, but what about when you are trying to install BusinessObjects across a number of different web servers. As Murphy’s law dictates, the documentation never seems to talk about your specific scenario. Am I right?

Welcome wdeploy!

Well, BusinessObjects has developed a really nice little deployment helper program called wdeploy. This is not available through the standard software download site, but rather is available from technical support:

Download wdeploy here

The documentation is located here:

Download wdeploy documentation here

wdeploy Enhances Performance

Many customers choose to implement an external web server in front of the BI stack for one or many of the following reasons:

• They wish to implement a DMZ
• They wish for the web server to serve up static web content only, thereby removing this load from the web app server
• They wish to offload the SSL work from Web App Servers

The key capabilities of wdeploy is that is loads the right resources on the right server. It can take the standard desktop.war file produced during installation of BusinessObjects and break it apart into two smaller WARs. One WAR just containing the static content and the other WAR containing the dynamic JSPs and Servlets.

Treat Your BI Vendors as a Strategic Partner

I just read a great article that I agree with wholeheartedly. John Myers writes a regular blog on BEYE website. Unfortunately he doesn’t provide a trackback, so I can’t easily reference his original posting, but here’s what he says:

The next time that I hear about how IT departments want to drive to a standard, I will forward to them either this Elana Varon interview with Gary Hamel, famed business strategist, or just send them in the direction of his new book.

Hamel rightly points out in Varon’s interview that too many IT organizations are moving toward a best practices model rather than a best for business model:

“So many companies are now running the same software platforms, whether Oracle or SAP or whatever. Increasingly, we rely on the same handful of off shoring companies or IT service companies. There are a whole lot of things that IT folks have to do to keep up as part of the IT arms race, but in the end the only thing that’s really going to make a difference is whether you’re using IT in a unique way to do unique things where you don’t find any other benchmarks. If you ask the average CIO what percentage of his total budget and headcount is devoted to things that are unique to his industry, I think it’s probably too small a number.”

For every opportunity to optimize business operations, those IT departments are taking one step away from maximizing the unique attributes of the business. In telecommunications, management needs to focus their strategies, and budgets, on what will break them from the pack of the “established” telecos (ie AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Telefonica) and position them for a unique position or offering that will provide competitive advantage.

Since I work for Business Objects, it’s my job to work with companies and help them to use Business Intelligence as a competitive advantage. The problem is that so often it’s the IT organizations that try and keep you at arms length. They treat you as “a vendor” and not as a strategic partner… and yet in my experience there are two key qualities which set companies apart:

1. The Acknowledgment of BI as a technology to provide strategic, competitive advantages
2. The mandate from upper management to realize those advantages

What companies so often don’t understand is that BI can be a GREAT vehicle for that competitive advantage. The marketing departments of every successful software company have articles about ROI, increased revenues, increased efficiencies, decreased costs, ROI, etc.

But what about long-standing competitive advantage?

This is especially critical in industries such as telecommunications where competition is fierce and we continue to see major innovations as these companies uses technology to set itself apart, but one of the biggest challenges is to know where you are today and were do you go from here? It’s amazing to me how many companies lack a comprehensive view of key corporate metrics. If you don’t know where you are, how are you supposed to know where to go next?

Do you know the answers to some of these key questions about your customers and products?

• Should we focus on customer attrition or on customers who are spending less that they did previously?
• How do targets affect discounts?
• Which products are discounted the most? Why?
• What is the spending profile of my different customer segments?
• How much revenue came from new vs. existing customers?
• Who is making the most revenue from the least number of sales?
• What percentage of our customers deliver the top 25% of our revenue?
• Why are customers moving from one segment to another?
• How soon after the sale do customers call for help? What products do they need help with?
• Did customers receive adequate training and information about the product?

Business Intelligence provides you a framework to answer all these types of questions. Most organizations have this data somewhere in their enterprise data warehouse or operational system but either don’t see the value or have yet to make the appropriate investments and having the data but not turning that data into intelligent information, is like burning money.

Getting the most out of BusinessObjects

I often get asked about getting the most out of BusinessObjects, so I thought I would take a few moments to mention an often overlooked factor is being successful with BusinessObjects.

What do companies need to do to make their investment in BusinessObjects pay off?

There are the obvious things such as creating a Center of Excellence around BusinessObjects and enforce adherence to those standard processes, procedures and development standards. There is the need for education to make sure that people know how to use the tool and getting help from consultants when appropriate… but there is one additional factor that I think is critical to success.

Embrace the SDK. Yes, that’s right - leverage the BusinessObjects SDK to allow the software to work for you in a way that makes everyone’s lives easier. You can always develop best practices, processes and procedures on paper, but the best way to enforce them is by building SDK support around those standards.

AT&T Embraced the SDK

One outstanding example is at AT&T. They needed to be able to support over 50,000 end users (and this number continues to grow) and hundreds of report developers with minimal support staff. The team realized that the only way to make sure that the system enforced those standards was to leverage the SDK.

Their business requirements included:

• Create an application for the migration, tracking, and versioning of Crystal Reports between Development, QC, and Production.
• Assign roles to users to perform different functions in the Report Development Life Cycle
• Enforce AT&T standards such as exact placement of logos, headers, and footers
• Historical versioning to go back to previous versions should a bug be introduced. Used as information on how many times the report has been checked-in, migrated to QC, and migrated to Production.
• Results in a clean easily maintainable system

This lead them to the following technical requirements:

• Track the creation and modifications of reports through a checkin/check-out process in the development environment
  • Developers can only save reports to their own user folder in Enterprise preventing any changes in naming or multiple versions.
• Roles assigned to the Users
  • Developer: New Reports, Check-In, Check-Out, Transport to QC
  • Tester: Approving / Denying Reports, Documenting Defects
  • Release/Change Manager: Approving migrations to Production when all necessary items have been accounted for
  • Administrator: Full control of the tool, adding users to above roles
• Prevent any modifications to the reports that could be introduced through the migration between environments in the Crystal Reports Designer.
  • Automatically set the dB location on reports through the RDC
  • Saves the report to the exact location with correct naming
  • No accidental clicking/moving/changing/deleting of objects on reports
• Provide specific templates of reports for a developer to use which contain the standard AT&T Logo, headers, footers, font (size, face, style) and location already set for new report development

As you can see, there were some pretty extensive requirements and in order to achieve these goals, either one of two things would have to happen.

1. Nag Business Objects until they capitulate and put these capabilities into the software natively.
2. Embrace the SDK and build it yourself.

The team at AT&T did the later with remarkable results which they shared with other BusinessObjects Users during the INSIGHT 2006 conference. Click here to download the entire presentation.

Now, one could argue that Business Objects should provide this capability out of the box, but the reality is that no BI software company will be able to provide an Enterprise Business Intelligence solution that will meet all of your requirements 100%. What IS important is that the solution provide an extensive SDK which will allow you to customize your environment to meet your companies needs.

When talking with companies about BusinessObjects I like to talk about the rich history that BusinessObjects has around SDK and developer support. Our communities might not be as reach as Microsoft or BEA, but we have recently made some great strides forward with our launch of the Diamond Developer Site.

Another great resource is a book written by Carl Ganz, Jr. called Pro Crystal Enterprise/Business Objects XI Programming. This is an excellent resource for learning about software development - specifically for the BOE platform. For me, the only problem with the book is that I wish it included samples written in Java; however all the samples are very clearly detailed and Carl does a great job at stepping the developer through the core components of the SDK. I highly recommend this book.

As I come across good sample of the SDK in action I will make these available on my blog. I also recommend that you begin to troll through many of the samples on the Diamond Developer Site.

I truly believe that the best and most successful Enterprise Business Intelligence implementations take advantage of the SDK to customize the software works so that it works more efficiently for the organization and ultimately for the administrators and end-users. In the meantime, we’ll continue to push the development team at Business Objects to add more and more features into the products.

Happy SDKing.

Embedding Web Controls into Crystal Reports

Bringing Together HTML Controls and Crystal Reports

Every once in a while I get a chance to present in a forum or user group and show some new amazing capabilities in the product suite. Last year I had the chance to demonstrate WebElements. WebElements is a collection of Crystal functions which generate HTML.

An easy to use library of functions for Crystal Reports designers:

• Designed by a report designer for report designers
• Embed different kinds of controls for report consumers
• Easily distributed as an .rpt file to other report designers
• Small in size, less than 60k unzipped
• Automated installation
• Expandable and customizable and code can be shared

Since Microsoft Reporting Services provides easy to use drop-down parameters, more and more customers are asking for the ability to embed web controls into their Crystal Reports. Now with Webelements we can add radio buttons, list boxes, drop-down selectors, action buttons, etc. In fact, Jamie Wiseman, the original creator of WebElements has a lot of great samples you can download from the Business Objects Diamond Developer website.

WebElements Online Presentation

Click on the picture below to access my WebElements presentation:

I’d love to hear your feedback on WebElements.