Enterprise software developer Business Objects on Monday launched version 6.1 of its business intelligence suite, which provides improved support for LDAP, Oracle's 9i database and ERP products.
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 is the latest version of the company's Business Intelligence (BI) solution, which is designed to allow a large company to use its operational data to improve decision making and business performance by offering a clearer view of what is going on within the business.
Richard Neale, a product marketing manager at BusinessObjects, said that in order to calculate a particular customer's loyalty and potential lifetime value, you need to bring together information from the company's financial and CRM systems. "In the past, companies have had separate products from separate vendors and had to piece together their BI solution. We have been trying to provide as much functionality in a single product that we possibly can so you can standardise on it," he said.
According to Neale, version 6.1 can analyse data from existing enterprise applications. "We don't mind if the data is in Oracle 9i OLAP or in a normal Oracle warehouse or in an ERP system like SAP -- our job is to make sense of data wherever it is and give the user a single view of their business."
Neale said the latest update provides more power and flexibility to both end users as well as the IT administrator. "It is important to control and manage access to various information sources so we have improved our support for Oracle 9i. If that is your data source, you can use BusinessObjects over the top of it as a presentation layer. We have also added LDAP support, so it doesn't matter if users are using Active directory or other systems."
"Our strength is to be able to deeply integrate into SAP, Oracle or Microsoft -- you name the system and we can do it," said Neale.
The BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.1 suite is available immediately. Costs are dependent on the number of users and functionality required, but can be expected to be in the range of several hundred pounds per user.
