Business Objects Enters Analytic Apps MarketBusiness Objects Enters Analytic Apps Market

Business Objects SA will join the increasingly crowded analytic applications market Tuesday when it unveils a data analysis platform and a suite of sales, customer, and marketing-campaign analytical software. The Paris company will be competing head-to-head with market players Cognos, Hyperion, and Informatica.

The core of the new product line is the Business Objects Application Foundation, an analytic engine upon which users run analytic applications from Business Objects or applications custom built using development tools included with the platform. Application Foundation also includes a catalog of more than 70 pre-built templates for assembling analytic applications. Business Objects says the sales, customer, and campaign analysis software, which will work together by sharing the same data definitions, are the first of a series of such applications.

Does the world need more analytical applications? Giga Information Group analyst Keith Gile says the new software will provide more data analysis capabilities to users of Business Objects' query and reporting tools. But the new Business Objects software, he says, still doesn't address the bigger problem of integrating data from multiple sources, such as customer databases and call-center transaction systems.

Business Objects is already shipping the Application Foundation and the sales analysis application. The customer and campaign analysis software will follow by the end of the month. Pricing for the Application Foundation is server-based, starting at $195,000 for a four-processor, Windows-based server. The analytical applications are priced at $95,000 each.