Bernard Liautaud, chairman and CEO of Business Objects SA, recently spoke to Computerworld from his Paris office about the company"s launch of Business Objects XI, which provides back-end integration of Crystal Decisions Inc. reporting technology to the Business Objects platform. Business Objects acquired Crystal Decisions in late 2003.
What is the significance of XI? Does it mean the completion of the integration of the Crystal products into your system? XI completes the integration between Crystal and Business Objects. If we look at where BI has been in the past several years, it has provided a lot of value, but there are still many, many people in corporations who do not use BI. Up to now, although a lot of vendors have wanted to do that, we have never been able to reach it.
This platform provides a way to reach this broad mass of users who so far had no access to it because it was too complicated. We provide a much simpler interface than before ... in their Microsoft Office environment. They don"t have to move out of the productivity environment.
What are the main new features and functionality in XI? We call it "extreme insight" because it brings BI in a different way than it was before with a level of capabilities and context that didn"t exist before. You can view it as the Google of enterprise structured data. You can understand where the information is and what the information means. It is very important for users to have that comfort and assurance that the information is correct. It comes from the ability to know where the information is coming from (and) from the robustness and quality of the platform.
(XI) brings collaboration into the system with threaded discussions to bring BI not just to individuals but (also) to groups.
Business Objects has bolstered both business and technical metadata management in XI. What will this mean for users? What happens often in BI deployments is in developing reports and queries and analysis, you can get overloaded with reports. This idea is having not just a list of reports but (also) a true encyclopedia that brings a business context to the information. What the terms in a report actually mean in the context of the business is very important, (and) up to now, these reports were raw information. On the technical side, it is more the ability to have that semantic layer, go through the whole platform using metrics and measures and formulas -- so the development of reports ... is metadata-driven.
What future trends do you see driving the business intelligence market? Our customers want to deploy an enterprise solution throughout their company instead of having multiple fragmented solutions for BI. They need to have a platform that is a unique platform on which they can plug in all the components. The BI needs are getting broader and broader. They need to do reporting at the enterprise level. They need to embed reporting and analysis into all sorts of applications. They need to do some self-service access to information, (and) they need to share info ... with customers and partners.