With apologies to our friend/choreographer Darren Cunningham, still on a roll over at the Lucid Era blog, his world just got a whole lot more interesting today with the announcement by Business Objects that yes, they really ARE serious about On-Demand business intelligence, and dammit they’ve got the hoppin after-party to prove it!
After some small foray’s into the on-demand market through crystalreports.com and the purchase of their FIRST “Insight” named company, the company had gone largely dark in terms of its strategy and direction in this area. Mysterious blog entries by internal luminaries like Timo Elliott told us something was up, since Timo tends to be somewhat of an Oracle on these things, as the company’s semi-official blogmaster (so look for his next posting on how cool SAP, IBM, HP, and Adobe would be to work for at “some point” of his career given today’s “other” news…).
The Business Objects strategy is both sound and comprehensive, and includes some sizzle as well, with the introduction of their external “Information OnDemand” site, which allows users to buy or rent access to prepackaged industry information that can be used in a dashboard to facilitate analysis with internal data.
But sizzle aside, by partnering with “The end of software” leader salesforce.com, and using as its tagline “BI with no servers and no software,” they are clearly going to continue to pay attention to this space and may roll out future offerings tied to other parts of the business, like performance management and analysis to end up with a parallel product offering of license and on-demand offerings.
One key will be pricing. This represents a miniscule portion of the Business Objects revenue. Will they be competitive with companies like Lucid Era and Adaptive Planning? Do they need to be? Do they just want more customers? Another key will be the friction of the revenue model from 600+ sales people who want big license deals. When it gets to, say, mid-September with two weeks to go, will they steer the customer towards the annuity payments, or the big up-front license costs? Just two of probably 102 questions that the on-demand vendors will have as FUD in the coming weeks.
In any case, I think I have the song that Darren might want to parody next—“Don’t you want me baby?”
After some small foray’s into the on-demand market through crystalreports.com and the purchase of their FIRST “Insight” named company, the company had gone largely dark in terms of its strategy and direction in this area. Mysterious blog entries by internal luminaries like Timo Elliott told us something was up, since Timo tends to be somewhat of an Oracle on these things, as the company’s semi-official blogmaster (so look for his next posting on how cool SAP, IBM, HP, and Adobe would be to work for at “some point” of his career given today’s “other” news…).
The Business Objects strategy is both sound and comprehensive, and includes some sizzle as well, with the introduction of their external “Information OnDemand” site, which allows users to buy or rent access to prepackaged industry information that can be used in a dashboard to facilitate analysis with internal data.
But sizzle aside, by partnering with “The end of software” leader salesforce.com, and using as its tagline “BI with no servers and no software,” they are clearly going to continue to pay attention to this space and may roll out future offerings tied to other parts of the business, like performance management and analysis to end up with a parallel product offering of license and on-demand offerings.
One key will be pricing. This represents a miniscule portion of the Business Objects revenue. Will they be competitive with companies like Lucid Era and Adaptive Planning? Do they need to be? Do they just want more customers? Another key will be the friction of the revenue model from 600+ sales people who want big license deals. When it gets to, say, mid-September with two weeks to go, will they steer the customer towards the annuity payments, or the big up-front license costs? Just two of probably 102 questions that the on-demand vendors will have as FUD in the coming weeks.
In any case, I think I have the song that Darren might want to parody next—“Don’t you want me baby?”
4 comments:
Nice one Guy. I look forward to the full lyrics! Your "readers" (aka Pat, Nic, and occassionally Lance) might find this post interesting:
http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/16/jumping-on-the-on-demand-bandwagon/
It outlines 4 primary challenges that traditional enterprise software vendors (Microsoft included) face when it comes to delivering SaaS solutions.
How dare you sir!
My dog reads as well...
Let me emphasize that it's my PERSONAL blog (are you trying to get me shut down?!) :-)
Yes, let me clarify that it was Timo's PERSONAL blog--not the official BOBJ blog--sorry Timo!
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