Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Business Objects Conference: Initial Keynotes

It is Monday. It must be the Business Objects Conference in San Francisco.

With a splash of Rhythm Extreme, the conference launched. At least, the actors were in synch. Will the company also be? There are 2,400 attendees, a 20% growth rate in attendance over the last several years. 150 sessions offered. Only one-twentieth the size of the Oracle Conference just two weeks ago, also in Moscone Center, but it is still impressive.

John Schwarz, CEO, spoke on the theme of BI being the enabler for transforming the way we work. He stated that BOBJ has 39,000 customers garnered over its 15 year history. He projecting annual revenue of $1.2B for 2006. Partnership program has grown to 3,000 companies. He emphasized the characteristics of High-Performance Organizations as having alignment, simplicity, trust, innovation in enterprise business intelligence. He also emphasized the industry specific solutions in financial services, telecommunications, government, healthcare and so on. A new product, The Productivity Suite, was announced for delivery early next year. To make it easier for smaller companies, their tools will be offered as a Software-As-A-Service. IBM was mentioned as a 'special' strategic partner. I wonder about the possibility of IBM acquiring Business Objects...

Bernard Liautaud, Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, then spokes on his vision for BI 2.0. Like Web 2.0, Bernard feels that BI is undergoing a revolution in its usage and impacts on organizations, causing many constructive innovations and disruptive upheavals. Thus, he (like several others) is coining this phrase BI 2.0. Last year, Bernard listed five areas that he was focusing upon: users, platforms, networks, applications, community. My reaction was that his framework was to broad, needing to focus more on key issues. He predicted that ERP would evolve into an information-centric solution based upon BI. Bernard seemed current in his understand of Web 2.0, but he was still searching for the right formula relevant to Business Objects.

They announced a community aggregator The In-Site open to all conference attendees. I predict that this will be a standard part of trade conferences. Too bad that it starts after an event. It would to nice to use this as a planning/coordination mechanism prior to the event.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Monday, 6 November 2006 | Permalink