Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Get ready for a whole lotta lauchin’!




Big week coming up in the world of BI and performance management, as both Business Objects and Microsoft get ready for their respective product launches.

Business Objects is first up tomorrow, with their EPM XI launch webcast, touting the integration of the former Cartesis products being rapidly integrated onto the XI platform. We’ll leave it to them to explain what this actually means, since they’ve previously announced a year-long roadmap to integrate the products. But this should help some with current XI customers and with the bulk of the sales force who are selling XI to the IT function make a clearer case why they should consider Business Objects for performance management.

Microsoft is up next week, as they kick-off the PerformancePoint Server launch with a big soiree in New York City, and later next month in London. Seeing as how they’ve been talking about the product for the past two years, it’s about time! But in the wake of the hype in the market, the glowing analyst reports from the tier 1 firms, and the momentum within the Microsoft customer base (their first BI conference in May was 40% larger than the 2006 Business Objects Americas conference, now in its 11th year), it should be interesting to see how this product takes hold in the market.

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