SAP got into business intelligence in a big way with the 2007 acquisition of Business Objects. "For every use case in BI, they've got a good tool," says Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

Moreover, Business Objects products aren't dependent on the broader SAP product stack, according to Steve Lucas, general manager of business analytics and technology at SAP. "Half of our [Business Objects] development resources are focused on non-SAP use cases," he says. "Over half of our customers have nothing from SAP except analytics."

SAP is also positioning its new Hana in-memory database engine as a foundation for the core Business Objects suite and a new series of specialized analytics applications.

Many Business Objects customers are large enterprises, but SAP also sells subsets of the full suite to small and midsize companies.