'BusinessObjects XI will break down the barriers to BI adoption'

Business objects, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI),
launched BusinessObjects XI in India in January 2005. Lee Boon Huat, vice
president for Asia Pacific at Business Objects, who was in the capital recently,
spoke to Bhaswati Chakravorty of Dataquest about how the latest launch from its
stables would bring all technologies on one platform-and take BI to a larger
user base.

How will BusinessObjects XI make business intelligence a mainstream
technology?

The launch of BusinessObjects XI is driven by the need of enterprises to
standardize all BI needs on a single advanced platform. It is the first and only
BI platform that delivers a complete set of leading BI capabilities like class
reporting, query and analysis, performance management, and data integration.
Through BusinessObjects XI, we complete the integration of the Crystal and
Business Objects product lines and introduce significant innovations that will
deliver BI in new ways to a broader set of users. It will make BI a mainstream
technology in organizations.

How would BusinessObjects XI take BI to a broader set of users?

Most professionals today work on Microsoft Office and store critical
business data in Office applications. BusinessObjects XI brings BI directly to
these users by embedding BI directly in Office applications. For example, a
business user can read a BusinessObjects XI report directly within a Power Point
document

Lee Boon Huat

Second, for widespread adoption of BI, any application should provide
technical and business users with more than just raw data. BusinessObjects XI
includes an important innovation called BI Encyclopedia. Embedded directly in
BusinessObjects XI reports, the BI Encyclopedia tells users the definitions of
business terms and the questions that report answers. The encyclopedia also
helps in finding other reports with related information. In addition, it allows
users to engage in collaborative analysis and decision-making directly within
dashboards, scorecards, and reports. We expect the new features in
BusinessObjects XI to break down the barriers to BI adoption.

How does BuisnessObjects XI take care of reliability and data credibility-the
single-largest concern for enterprises today?

The BusinessObjects XI platform is built on a Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) and builds on the only BI platform that Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Datacenter has certified for reliability. As the platform is based on SOA
standards, organizations can adapt their BI deployments, as business strategy
and heterogeneous computing environments evolve.

Its platform is also unmatched in its ability to intelligently distribute
processing among servers, based on server performance and availability. This
ensures that server errors or system failures remain invisible to end-users and
the content is preserved. This also means that a critical BI application is not
dependent on a single server and it automatically redirects processing to
another server in case a particular server fails.

BusinessObjects XI has the capability to automatically turn on and turn off
server resources based on demand. Intelligent server provisioning ensures high
performance, unlike other BI products that require maximum amount of server
resources at all times or risk poor performance during peak usage periods.