Stories about: Business Objects

IBM has signed a deal to buy supply and contract management software vendor Emptoris in another bid to fill out its growing catalog of business-to-business and business-to-consumer commerce technologies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the deal, which is scheduled to close in the first quarter of next year, were not provided.

Taking a cue from rivals such as Salesforce.com, SAP on Monday announced a partnership under which it will resell and support social media analytics software from NetBase.

SAP got into business intelligence in a big way with the 2007 acquisition of Business Objects. "For every use case in BI, they've got a good tool," says Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson. Moreover, Business Objects products aren't dependent on the broader SAP product stack, according to Steve Lucas, general manager of business analytics and technology at SAP. "Half of our [Business Objects] development resources are focused on non-SAP use cases," he says. "Over half of our customers have nothing from SAP except analytics."

When your company contracts with an enterprise applications vendor for a fixed number of software licenses for your users, it behooves you to carefully monitor that usage at all times.

SAP and Rent-a-Center are locked in a legal battle over whether the rent-to-own chain owes the vendor about US$9 million in fees for excess use of its Business Objects analytics software.

SAP has seen software sales rebound steadily after a dip during the global recession, and is hoping to supercharge its business with forays into in-memory computing, SaaS (software as a service) and mobile applications, a business it entered with last year's acquisition of Sybase.

SAP is planning to connect its analytics software with Google's Maps and Earth software, allowing users to mine insights from plotting business data against locations around the world, the companies announced Wednesday.

Thousands of SAP partners who sell the Business All-in-One ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite and Business Objects analytics software can now also offer customers Sybase mobile technology and applications, SAP announced this week.

If your enterprise has customized your mission-critical ERP systems over the years, your future upgrades will likely be more troublesome and terrifying because the changes can conflict with the patches. On the other hand, if you are running out-of-the-box ERP with little customization, maybe you're not getting all the important features your business needs.

MicroStrategy is rolling out a cloud-based service that allows the exchange of data between Facebook and enterprise applications, the BI (business intelligence) vendor announced Tuesday during its user conference in Monte Carlo.