Business Objects Upgrades Its Analytics Suite

Analytics provider Business Objects today announced an upgrade of its business intelligence (BI) suite, which allows organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. Available immediately, BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 provides enhanced performance and analysis features, increased data integration, simplified dashboard personalization, and streamlined enterprise deployment capabilities. Doug Laney, vice president and service director at Meta Group, says that data integration is one of the most critical and confounding challenges faced by IT organizations today. He notes that as BI vendors start to provide integrated, high-end extract, transform, load (ETL) and BI offerings, users can expect to see more tools that strive to drive business performance within their organizations. The worldwide analytic applications software market is expected to reach more than $4.8 billion by 2007, according to a recently issued report by IDC. CRM analytics is projected to grow the fastest, with a compound annual growth rate of 12.9 percent. According to the company, the new version makes it easier for a variety of users, including casual report consumers, report authors, power users, and executives, to use the product. Release 6.1 expands on-report analysis capabilities of Business Objects' WebIntelligence product by enabling users to sort and filter data, add, and remove report data, and include simple calculations without switching to a more sophisticated report-authoring environment. Enterprise 6.1 provides access to Oracle9i OLAP, in addition to its connectivity to all other leading OLAP servers including Hyperion Essbase, IBM DB2 OLAP Server, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, and SAP BW. BusinessObjects Data Integrator 6.1 sports a new graphical user interface and incorporates comprehensive data preview and profiling directly into the extraction, transformation, and loading environment. Users can also more easily personalize their own display of key performance indicators, maximizing dashboard relevance and impact. Enterprise 6.1 introduces additional performance and scalability enhancements across the entire product line, including parallel processing, sophisticated caching, and enhanced clustering that deliver performance improvements of 20 percent to 500 percent, according to the company.