Q&A: John Schwarz, chief executive, Business Objects

According to Gartner’s latest figures, Business Objects leads the market with an 18.2 per cent share. What do you think are the reasons for such success?

Well the business intelligence (BI) market is growing by 10 per cent a year at the moment and the core BI market is the query, reporting and analysis component, which is by far the biggest chunk of our revenue. Also the enterprise information management and the enterprise performance management markets are growing faster than ever before.

Which competitor do you regard as your biggest threat?

In the core BI segment, we are roughly around 30 per cent larger than our nearest competitor but we would regard Cognos (now an IBM company) and Hyperion (an Oracle company) as the main threat, and then Microstrategy and SAS from the smaller players, and Information Builders and QlikTech from the tiny players.

In the information management space, I believe we are neck and neck with Informatica.

In the enterprise performance area, I think we are neck and neck with Hyperion – although it always had the stronger lead in this area, now Business Objects has been able to combine with SAP’s offerings, we expect revenues in this segment to soon surpass that of Hyperion's.

Prior to acquisition by SAP, Business Objects had just announced a new push into the mid-market with the launch of the Edge Series. How is that going?

The offerings have been very successful. We have now finished replacing all our mid-market offerings with the Edge Series.

SAP recently announced it would sunset its BI Netweaver tools, including Business Explorer, Web Application Designer and Report Designer. How is this strategy going?

The Netweaver middleware will remain as an independent middleware platform and Business Objects will borrow pieces of Netweaver to enable more effective deployment of BI. For example, SAP deployed the BI Accelerator, which has a strong NetWeaver component based on its search and classification tool. The tool will improve the usability of complex queries though the use of in-memory data compression.

The BI features of NetWeaver will be maintained until 2016 and then subset. Customers can continue to buy the NetWeaver BI tools and be supported in their use until this date, but the premium offering is now Business Objects.

How difficult will the move be for customers in 2016 and what should they expect to pay for the new Business Objects tools?

There is a component of NetWeaver called Business Warehouse that is used to store customers’ operational data. All the BI tools SAP supplies run on top of the warehouse offering. So if customers switch to different BI tools, their data will not move. This will make the move quite easy.

Customers will be charged for the switch over because Busines Objects supplies premium BI tools, but the exact cost is difficult to say because the amount will depend on how many tools they buy and the status of their relationship with SAP and as a primary vendor.

How have your most recent releases, such as the Business Objects Metadata Management System and Xcelsius Engage kept up with the latest innovation in the BI market?

Customers do not think of BI as a passive solution anymore but as a lot more dynamic. They want to visualise their data now and then be able to drill down into the detail when they need. We find the larger companies are a lot more competitive in this area than the smaller companies who are still tending to use BI as just a reporting tool.

So, does the name BI still fit the offering?

Not really. I’d prefer it to be called Business Performance Management or Business Insight. But then it’s better to keep the definition firms use.

How are you moving forward in the application mash-up area?

We are penetrating this area. We give customers demos on how the Xcelsius static view of the world can be substituted with the Google earth view of the world.

There were initial reports that customers had some difficulties when SAP merged its support system with Business Objects. Is this issue now fully resolved?

This was a hiccup in the SAP system but it has now been fully resolved.

SAP combined its enterprise performance management software with the Business Objects tools in order to enhance its risk management offering. Is SAP looking at any other ways Business Objects technology can added to other products in its portfolio?

SAP is working hard at the moment to create an MDM [master data management] solution and there are other things that we can’t talk about.

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