SAP Buys Business Objects for $6.78 Billion

October 8, 2007 from PC World – “The acquisition is intended partly to help SAP reach an ambitious goal of doubling its customer base to 100,000 by 2010. Schwarz said about 40 percent of Business Objects' customers are using SAP today. Business Objects has roughly 45,000 customers, suggesting SAP will gain about 27,000 new customers through the deal.

SAP has made some progress with its own business intelligence software, including an analytics engine called BI Accelerator. But Business Objects excels in ease of use and user interface technologies, which will become increasingly important to BI in the future, IDC's Lykkegaard said.

"Business intelligence in the future will increasingly become a user interface for applications," he said. "You'll do your analysis from the BI interface and then dive directly into the transactional data you want to examine."

180 View – For those of you who don’t know Business Objects, you do probably know Crystal Reports, which was acquired by Business Objects in 2003. We think it’s going to be a hard swallow by SAP in that Business Objects has multiple products that overlap not only themselves but also with SAP’s existing business intelligence tools. Also difficult will be supporting all the competing ERP vendors that rely on Crystal reports.