Business Objects Unveils Product RoadmapBusiness Objects Unveils Product Roadmap

Business Objects S.A. released on Thursday a roadmap for the integration of its business intelligence products with reporting technology obtained in the acquisition of Crystal Decisions, which closed last month.

In addition, the San Jose, Calif., company announced the general availability of version 10 of the Crystal suite of products.

Phase one of the roadmap includes the release of a product integration pack in the second quarter of this year for combing Crystal products with Business Objects' business intelligence tools. The pack includes portal integration, common web services application programming interfaces and the option of using Business Objects metadata as a data source for Crystal Reports.

Phase two will provide platform-level integration for both companies' core products, providing a common infrastructure with common administration. This is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

In phase three, the company expects to deliver complete integration of all product functionality on one platform, which is set for release in 2005.

The newly released version 10 suite of products combines the Crystal Enterprise reporting platform with the report design tools of Crystal Analysis and Crystal Reports.