Monday, April 23, 2007

Business Objects to Acquire Cartesis

I'll post this largely without comment, and let my fellow performance guys dive into the details, and "what this might mean" for the performance management space. But as the three of us at one time or another have worked at Business Objects, one of the most consistent pieces of critical feedback from analysts and customers has been the lack of consolidations capabilities within the portfolio.

And while consolidations might not be a super high-growth area, the lack of an enterprise offering has stymied Business Objects from really penetrating the enterprise CFO office on a regular basis. So the announcement of the intent to acquire Cartesis today portends well for a strong end to end offering for the company in EPM.

More thoughts as the days and weeks progress...

1 comment:

Nic Smith said...

The performance management space is not just heating up, it’s on fire. Following on the heels of the Oracle announcement to acquire Hyperion, BI pure play leader Business Objects announced the intent to acquire Cartesis, a privately held performance management company. Cartesis is a leading specialist in enterprise performance management (EPM) software with more than 1,300 customers worldwide. Cartesis provides financial reporting, consolidations, and planning capabilities, as well as a new governance, risk, and compliance portfolio.
http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070422_005093

What does this acquisition mean for Business Objects?
• Business Objects will be looked at differently in the performance management space by analysts (likely moving into a leadership position in the next Gartner Quad), this is their third performance management acquisition in the past 2 years (see below for a brief history)
• Business Objects is becoming “the Oracle” of the BI space, by that I mean they are snapping up all kinds of smaller BI category vendors, this demonstrates the relationship performance management and information management have to BI (others will follow – likely some smaller BPM vendors)
• Business Objects strengthens their domain expertise in financial management solutions and its overall performance management leadership in EMEA, (Cartesis is also a French company)
• Business Objects will certainly have a tremendous amount of overlapping technology to be sorted out, recent acquisitions of SRC and ALG bring similar technologies to the table