So Sarbanes-Oxley has almost been a motivator for companies to get their IT house in order?
Now they are going to look for more compliance, more openness, more transparency but I think that first phase has been to get in shape because you need to get compliant by the end of 2005. Afterwards it will be, 'How can we optimise all of this so we don't have to do all these processes manually?'
You're trying to create a complete set of applications for BI. At the moment how many of your 29,000 customers are using other BI vendors' software too?
I think you need to distinguish the enterprise customer from the mid-market customer. With 29,000 customers, a lot of them are in the mid-market. We have a couple of thousand customers in the larger enterprise and all the others are in the smaller environments. That theory of standardisation really applies to the larger enterprise. The smaller companies tend to have one supplier but they haven't expanded to a large number of users and haven't expanded it to it full extent.
In terms of objective, one of the objectives we have is to expand our footprint within our customer base, within our enterprise base. The other objective is to acquire more customers at the lower end of the market as this is relatively untapped.
Microsoft could have potentially been a significant competitor to Crystal Decisions in the market of reporting tools aimed at smaller companies. Did this shape Crystal's Decision to allow themselves to be acquired by Business Objects?
It certainly played a role in our thinking. I think in general our strategy was that the market is consolidating, it is going to be appealing to larger firms, whether it's Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and at the same time customers want to have a safer choice and want to buy from the leader and we should be that leader. The stronger we are, the better armed we are to fight off any other entrant.
Business Intelligence seems to be fairly robust compared to the rest of the enterprise software market. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Do you see increasing competition from those companies in the future?
I think we will see more competition. But at the same time the market is growing and I believe there is space for a lot of players. However I think the lion's share of the market will go to an independent leader. What customers want is a solution that enables them to access all sorts of data and applications in the company. I don't believe a customer is going to pick a Siebel front-end to access SAP, it just doesn't make sense and the reverse either. But they will pick Business Objects to access both SAP and Siebel and to merge the data.
How close are you to providing that complete breadth of applications?
Today we are able to access anything. We have multiple customers who are accessing Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft using our software in the same company. That is a big part of our value proposition to large enterprises.
Your latest platform, Business Objects XI, has improved integration with Microsoft Office. Have you had any similar requests from customers to integrate with OpenOffice.org or Star Office?
I think at this point it is too early. It is already a big step to say 'Hey, BI can now become a part of the day-to-day office environment.' We are not at a point now where we are seeing significant customer demand for the others.
