I had the opportunity to sit through a Business Objects sales presentation earlier today. Here are a few things that surprised me:
First, I had missed the significance of their acquisitions in the data quality and ETL space. They now claim to be competitive with Ascential and Informatica for ETL, and to have acquired the number 2 player in data cleansing. I have no idea if this actually works on the ground - whether the products integrate, whether they are as good as they say, or whether BO actually knows anything about these areas. However, it does make for a compelling sales pitch.
Text analytics is an area I had heard they were making a foray into. The sales rep pushed that hard and talked about the capability to generate automatic reports containing structured and unstructured information. Again, no show - just tell, so I don't know how much is smoke.
XCelsius is a sexy product, though I have numerous concerns about it as an effective dashboard or analytical tool. I should not have been surprised that BO sales is leading 100% of their demos with it. They surf over the data architecture issues, and spend all their time showing the "interactive" Flash dials, charts etc. I couldn't believe they showed almost nothing else in their suite in a 1 hour demo!
Desktop widgets are cool. Essentially they can put any BO content into a desktop widget, which can then occupy portions of the user's desktop with updates in real-time. I had considered doing this with Google Desktop, but don't think they have much corporate penetration. BO's offering is again the kind of eye-candy that account execs can use to overturn any kind of real objections and get buyers emotionally involved.
Information Dashboard Success
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