Business Objects today announced the general availability of BusinessObjects™ XI Built for SAP. Business Objects now provides the most complete business intelligence offering for SAP customers, including reporting, query and analysis, performance management, and data integration, on a single platform that seamlessly integrates with the SAP solution-based environment.
Organizations invest millions of dollars to optimize their business processes with SAP solutions, however these companies also make critical business decisions using data from a variety of non-SAP applications. BusinessObjects XI Built for SAP enables companies to provide all users with timely information from SAP R/3, SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), and non-SAP data sources providing a single version of the truth across their business. Business Objects provides SAP customers with unparalleled access to information, creating agile organizations that can react to changing business environments to optimize their performance.
“With BusinessObjects XI, we get an out-of-the box solution for our reporting and analysis needs for the data stored in our SAP solution-based environment,” said Kenneth Stringer, CIO of Cutter & Buck (Nasdaq: CBUK), a leading designer of upscale sportswear and outerwear. “Our initial deployment will use the solution to report on and analyze sales distribution data, and we expect to leverage this module on future SAP BW data sets. Using BusinessObjects XI provides us with better access to the data and helps us to optimize business performance.”
BusinessObjects XI represents the sixth generation of Business Objects products that are tightly integrated with SAP solutions, and the eleventh generation integration for enterprise reporting. In addition, building on five years of successful collaboration, SAP continues to OEM and resell Business Objects as the only third-party reporting solution provided out-of-the-box with SAP BW, a component of the SAP NetWeaver platform.
“With the most business intelligence customers in the industry using SAP solutions, Business Objects is the de-facto business intelligence standard for SAP solutions and provides customers with insight across their entire organization,” said Bernard Liautaud, chairman and CEO of Business Objects. “Business Objects understands the unique business intelligence needs of SAP customers and has worked closely with SAP to tightly integrate our solutions.
BusinessObjects XI builds on this integration to deliver an open solution that enables organizations to provide information in a way all users understand and value, and it empowers customers to gain extreme insight from the data in their SAP and non-SAP solution-based environments.”
The Business Objects suite provides SAP customers with a comprehensive range of capabilities, including:
Enterprise Reporting: Crystal Reports® is the industry standard for enterprise reporting, and SAP bundles a packaged version of this intuitive reporting solution for use in SAP BW. A key part of BusinessObjects XI Built for SAP, Crystal Reports XI enables the rapid creation of print-quality reports, allowing IT to spend more time on additional value-added projects. Business Objects also provides pre-built report templates across all functional areas of SAP BW and SAP R/3. Customers can easily access and view data from SAP solutions and non-SAP sources to get a truly complete business operations view. Customers benefit from native application-layer connectivity to SAP R/3 that fully utilizes SAP’s business logic and security. In addition, a unique BAPI interface to SAP BW scales to support the rigorous demands of the largest SAP deployments.
Query and Analysis: Business Objects query and analysis solutions empower individuals to answer their own business questions without the costly dependence on IT support. Casual users and business analysts can both interact with information inside SAP BW, SAP R/3, and non-SAP sources within an intuitive self-service environment. This provides a robust, easy-to-use experience for ad hoc query and analysis beyond what an excel-based solution can provide, and protects end users from source data complexity via the patented Business Objects semantic layer. In addition, Business Objects offers native BAPI access for more advanced OLAP analysis.
Performance Management: Business Objects performance management products help organizations align users with strategy by tracking and analyzing key business metrics and goals via management dashboards, scorecards, and alerts. These easy to deploy solutions enable users to gain visibility into organizational strategy and the metrics that matter most for improving performance. Drawing on data from SAP solutions and non-SAP sources, these dashboards and scorecards provide customers with a holistic view of their business.
Data Integration: BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI gives SAP customers the ability to audit extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs and continually validate data integrity. Certified for SAP NetWeaver, BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI can be used to accelerate the implementation of SAP BW. Data Integrator allows SAP customers to jump-start BI projects with packaged ETL solutions, as well as integrate heterogeneous data into SAP BW or a custom data warehouse with one tool in a single, easy-to-use graphical interface.
The BusinessObjects Enterprise XI platform allows SAP customers to deploy any combination of these end-user capabilities on a scalable, service-oriented architecture. BusinessObjects Enterprise XI provides a single, trusted platform that automatically integrates with SAP security features. Users of SAP solutions can take advantage of the innovations in BusinessObjects XI, including live data access from Microsoft Office applications, threaded discussions for end-user collaboration, and the BI Encyclopedia to help users quickly understand and interpret data and take action.
BusinessObjects XI Built for SAP provides Unicode and multiple platform support that allows SAP customers to securely deliver business intelligence to every end user, at any level in the organization, for a truly global deployment. For more information on Business Objects solutions for SAP, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/SAP/.
