Business information software company Business Objects
has unveiled a roadmap for integrating its products with those of
Crystal Decisions, which it bought last July.
A product integration pack will be produced by the second
quarter of this year, designed to enable integration of the
companies' portals, provide common web service Application Program
Interfaces and allow Business Objects metadata to be accessed and
used by Crystal Reports.
Eventually, customers will get the dashboard, scorecarding, and
query, analysis and reporting capabilities already embedded in
Business Objects, along with the scalability and delivery
mechanisms that are part of Crystal Decisions' reporting suite.
Any overlap will be eliminated. For instance, Business
Objects will keep its portal while swapping in the broadcasting
capabilities from Crystal Decisions along with that company's
superior back-end administration, security and metadata rules
management, said Chris Caren, vice president of corporate product
marketing.
Caren added that the company will offer tools to migrate
implementations of both products seamlessly. The new iterations
will be backward-compatible with existing products, and the
upgrades will be free.
Business Objects said the two products should have been
integrated at platform level by the end of the year. Core products
from both lines will run on a common infrastructure with common
administration.
Complete integration is due in 2005.
Business Objects is now shipping Version 10 of the Crystal
suite. Among its enhancements is tighter integration with Microsoft
Office. It will also allow Java developers to embed reporting
capabilities into third-party or homegrown applications more
easily.
New simplification features have been added, such as the ability
to take a list of items formatted for SAP R/3 and rename it for
easier manipulation.
Business Objects is "carefully setting expectations in the
marketplace", said Ventana Research analyst Eric Rogge.
"I'd give them good marks for it. They're making sure they have
their customers on board, it's a conservative plan and doable."
However, Rogge questioned whether the merger will have much
effect on customers. "Many of Business Object's customers already
had Crystal software deployed in parallel with Business Objects. So
it's not a risk, they won't be worried about the merger, but
there's not a lot of benefit for them either. They already have the
products that do what they want."
Gillian Law writes for IDG News Service