BusinessObjects

For other uses, see business object.
BusinessObjects SA
Industry Computer software
Fate Acquired by SAP (2007)
Founded 1990
Headquarters San Jose, California and Paris, France
Key people
 John Schwarz, CEO
Bernard Liautaud, Chairman and Founder
Products Crystal Reports
BusinessObjects XI
Xcelsius
Data Services
Data Integrator
BusinessObjects Edge BI
Revenue $1.077 billion USD (2005)
Number of employees
 4,977 (as of Q2 2006)
Website www.sap.com

SAP BusinessObjects (a.k.a. BO, BOBJ) is an enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence (BI). BusinessObjects was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers worldwide in its final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP.[1] Its flagship product is BusinessObjects XI, with components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects also offers consulting and education services to help customers deploy its business intelligence projects. Other toolsets enable universes (the BusinessObjects name for a semantic layer between the physical data store and the front-end reporting tool) and ready-written reports to be stored centrally and made selectively available to communities of the users.

History

Bernard Liautaud co-founded in 1990 together with Denis Payre, and was chief until September 2005, when he became chairman and chief until January 2008. The concept of and its initial implementation came from Jean-Michel Cambot. According to Bernard Liautaud, Jean-Michel is an extraordinarily creative developer, someone who authored the initial concept of BusinessObjects.[2]

In 1990, the first customer, Coface, was signed. The company went public on NASDAQ in September 1994, making it the first European software company listed in the United States. In 2002, the company made Time Magazine Europe's Digital Top 25 of 2002 and were BusinessWeek Europe Stars of Europe.

On 7 October 2007, SAP AG announced[3] that it would acquire BusinessObjects for $6.8B. As of 22 January 2008, the corporation is fully operated by SAP; this is seen as part of a growing consolidation trend in the business software industry, with Oracle acquiring Hyperion in 2007 and IBM acquiring Cognos in 2008.

BusinessObjects had two headquarters in San Jose, California, and Paris, France, but their biggest office was in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company's stock was traded on both the Nasdaq and Euronext Paris (BOB) stock exchanges.

On April 2, 2007, a lawsuit from Informatica (inherited by BusinessObjects from the purchase of Acta Technologies in 2002) resulted in an award of $25 million in damages to Informatica for patent infringement. The lawsuit related to embedded data flows with one input and one output. Informatica asserted that the ActaWorks product (now sold by BusinessObjects as part of Data Integrator), infringed several Informatica patents including US Patent Nos. 6,014,670 and 6,339,775, both titled "Apparatus and Method for Performing Data Transformations in Data Warehousing." BusinessObjects subsequently released a new version of Data Integrator (11.7.2) which removed the infringing product capability.[4][5]

Timeline

References

  1. ↑ "Press and News | About SAP AG". SAP. Retrieved 2014-04-09.
  2. ↑ Liautaud, Bernard (2008-11-20). "Bernard Liautaud credits Jean-Michel Cambot for Business Objects concept". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2015-12-11.
  3. ↑ "SAP to buy BusinessObjects for $6.8B". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 2007-10-12. Retrieved 2007-10-07.
  4. ↑ "BusinessObjects Issues Statement on Informatica Lawsuit". BusinessObjects. Archived from the original on 26 July 2012. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
  5. ↑ "BusinessObjects vs. Informatica".
  6. ↑ "Bernard Liautaud Joins MySQL Board of Directors". MySQL. Retrieved October 18, 2010.
  7. 1 2 Howson, Cindi. BusinessObjects: the complete reference. RR Donnelley, 2003.
  8. ↑ "BusinessObjects Acquires OLAP@Work". May 9, 2000.
  9. ↑ "BusinessObjects Announces BusinessObjects MDX Connect, First Product in Enhanced OLAP Strategy". Information Management Online. June 27, 2000.
  10. ↑ Whiting, Rick (July 15, 2002). "BusinessObjects To Buy Acta In Analysis Software Deal". InformationWeek.
  11. ↑ "BusinessObjects Named to Business 2.0's 100 Fastest-Growing Technology Companies List.".
  12. ↑ Evers, Joris (July 18, 2003). "BusinessObjects to acquire Crystal Decisions". InfoWorld.
  13. ↑ Kirk, Jeremy (2006-12-01). "BusinessObjects acquires SaaS firm Nsite | Business". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2014-04-09.
  14. ↑ "Press and News | About SAP AG". SAP. Retrieved 2014-04-09.
  15. ↑ Whiting, Rick (Apr 23, 2007). "BusinessObjects To Acquire Cartesis". CRN.
  16. ↑ Havenstein, Heather (January 30, 2008). "BusinessObjects founder resigns after SAP acquisition". Computer World.
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