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SAP Business Objects eyes BI mkt in India

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CIOL Bureau
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MUMBAI, INDIA: It's over a year since SAP AG, the business software solutions provider acquired the French enterprise Business Objects that offers business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.

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The acquisition has added a new dimension to SAP's existing enterprise business solutions portfolio Business Objects is now directly against the biggies in BI market such as SAS, IBM, and Cognizant Technology Solutions and others.

According to Sanjay Deshmukh, vice president – Business Users, SAP Indian subcontinent, unlike any other acquisition within three weeks, SAP was out in the market with customers and media to share product road map.

He points out that there were zero conflicts between two companies and hence it helped in decision making, coming out with combined product road and bringing clarity among partners and customers.

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About product road map's technicality, he says there are two elements. “First, support and continual investment in the platform agnostic to nature of technology which builds confidence and address the of non-SAP customer's concerns, which were Business Objects' existing customers.

And second, SAP will continue to integrate Business Objects' technology completely in SAP stake and this element was more relevant for over 45,000 SAP 's customers worldwide.”

While, these large SAP customers were ready to accept Business Objects technology, still had business pains. Deshmukh explains, “All these SAP customers were looking forward to incorporate Business Objects' technology in their current SAP implementation because almost all of them had common business pain of not able to get the data captured in their SAP ERP applications, while doing management act, reporting and other activities.”

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Data capturing in ERP applications remains the requirements for SAP as well as non-SAP customers.

However, he claims that the company has been successful in delivering both promises and it continues to add lots of new SAP customers to its customer portfolio.

Moreover, Business Objects' technology is taking SAP to newer business segments.

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As Deshmukh says, “We continue to add more non-SAP customers, which is helping us to acquire market share in financial services segment, where SAP didn't have much footprint and the latest solution, SAP Business Objects Explorer, is targeted at that space.”

Explorer was launched in the last week of May, targeted at retail and consumers product goods, financial services and telecom sector can function as stand alone application for non SAP user and can be bundled with SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator solutions.

It has search capabilities, real-time visual information analysis and helps businesses with decisions-making process. In fact, SAP Business Objects has signed Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M), the automobile maker as a beta customers for Explorer software.

In order to take Explorer to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India, SAP has adopted the concurrent access licensing policy (CALP) that allows easy access to a small number of users out of the total staffs in any organization.

According to Gartner report - Market Trends Business Intelligence in APAC, the BI market will grow to US 357 million dollar by 2009, while for India the BI market is around US 17.9 million dollars for 2009 and expects to reach US$ 20.6 million by 2010.