Business Objects SA last month named John Schwarz as its CEO, replacing company founder Bernard Liautaud, who continues as chairman of the board and assumed the new role of chief strategy officer. Schwarz, who was previously president of Symantec Corp., recently spoke with Computerworld about his goals as head of business intelligence company -- including plans to broaden its market share by going after new markets.
Why did you make the move to Business Objects? Symantec was a much bigger company and getting bigger with the acquisition of Veritas.
I always wanted to be a CEO. I had a personal desire to test myself, to prove I am ready to do this. Most of the time when you get asked to come in and be a CEO ... there is something wrong at that business. ... You are coming in to restructure, to right the business. This is not the case at Business Objects. It is performing well, there are no outstanding SEC problems, no concerns that would force me to solve last year"s or past problems.
You and other company officials have said publicly that you want to grow the company from US$1 billion in revenue to one of the 10 largest software companies in the world. How do you propose to do that? We are somewhere in the low 20s [in terms of size] now. We have to double the size of the business. If you look at the market, there is $7 billion worth of revenue in our direct addressable market. Today we have 14 percent to 15 percent of market share. That gives a lot of head room. In the broader market, [by counting] analytics and tools and some of the applications that are used in the vertical industry, the size of the market doubles to $14 billion.
There are lots of opportunities also to acquire additional players around us to help us boost the growth. We will probably continue to acquire and add capacity and customers and products.
Do you plan to broaden your market share by going after new markets? Yes. Customers are asking us for more content that speaks specifically to their kind of business -- a bank customer wants applications that help them to manage the banking business. Up to today, the vast majority of our effort and products has focused on horizontal applications. Customers are saying, "We want you to help us build vertical applications," like modeling tools for the hospitals or planning tools for a retail organization. We have to begin to gain vertical knowledge [and] data models that are applicable in specific industries.
It is not practical for us to do all these applications ourselves. We will be looking to OEM our technology or reverse-OEM with our partners.
Business Objects this month announced the acquisition of Infommersion, a data visualization company. Why is the company focusing on this market? Our business is all about presenting data. It is all about explaining the results that customers get from the analysis they perform from their basic ERP or CRM systems. Infommersion [has] the best tool we have found that does that.
With very easy-to-use, end-user-oriented techniques, you can visualize or picture any amount of information. The graphical representation stays connected to the data so you can manipulate models. It clearly allows us to take our complex tools and target them at the end-user community rather than at the IT department. We can go outside the IT department and sell these tools.