Bernard Liautaud: Power Tools for the People
By Stephen Pritchard
March 23, 2005
Excerpted from the Financial Times
Bernard Liautaud, chief executive of Business Objects, is playing a numbers game.
He wants to increase the number of employees around the world who use business intelligence, but he will not be satisfied by single digit growth.
According to Mr Liautaud, most companies currently deploy business intelligence to between 15 and 20 per cent of their staff. His estimate is rather higher than that of most industry analysts, who put the figure at between 5 and 15 per cent. Mr Liautaud wants to see business intelligence used by 80 per cent of staff, from the specialist analyst to the power user, from board members to middle and lower management.
He cites the example of France Telecom to support his case: the operator currently has 70,000 people using Business Objects’ software, around half of its staff. And Mr Liautaud believes the case for business intelligence is sufficiently compelling not just to persuade companies to follow France Telecom’s lead but to go further still.
Achieving this aim will mean changing the way BI works, as well as the way companies think about using it. Business intelligence has its origins in specialist analysis and reporting tools, typically used by a small cadre of highly expert analysts. Mr Liautaud’s vision is for a tool that is as easy to use as Microsoft’s Office suite. Integration with Office is one of the ways he expects business intelligence to grow.
“Our strategy is to deliver very specialist tools for analysts and power users and tools for executives, but also to provide an intuitive approach for someone who might only use business intelligence once a week or once a month. And we will do all that from the Business Intelligence XI (extreme intelligence) platform.”
He points out that the majority of users at France Telecom are not power users doing complex data analysis, “but everyone needs access to some structured information.” he says. Mr Liautaud believes that this need is causing business intelligence to emerge as a fully-blown software category in its own right, alongside desktop productivity software, databases or ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems.
“Delivering [access to] information is a key element of an efficient organisation,” he says. “People need to know certain facts to make decisions and there is no better and cheaper way to do that than business intelligence.” He adds that the return on investment for business intelligence is better than for any other mainstream business software category.
For CIOs to buy into this vision, BI has to mature. Companies do not want to buy from a plethora of small reporting or analysis vendors. Nor do they want to buy from start-ups that might have great technology, but lack the financial muscle to develop and support their product lines.
“CIOs want to have one partner for ERP, one for databases and one for business intelligence,” he explains. “That means that each of those partners needs to have a large enough product line. And CIOs also want a safe choice of companies they can rely on, and be a partner for 10 years.”
Mr Liautaud is happy to position his company as a consolidator in the industry. Business Objects spent $300m buying Crystal Decisions, the reporting software company. The deal positioned Business Objects as the largest pure-play business intelligence company, but also extended its reach. As Mr Liautaud points out, almost all enterprises have some Crystal software somewhere in their businesses.
The deal has increased Business Objects’ revenues to $400m in the year ending in the third quarter of 2004, and increased the distance between the company and its nearest rivals. Mr Liautaud is also confident that a $400m a year company can offer the scale and financial stability CIOs demand. “We have said that the industry will consolidate, because customers want fewer suppliers,” he says. “But critical mass is also imperative if the industry is to establish itself as an independent category [of software]. It needed a market leader.”
Mr Liautaud does not rule out further acquisitions, but he acknowledges that Business Objects will have to continue to invest in its software, if it is to see off the growing threat from elsewhere in the software business, especially from enterprise software giants SAP and Oracle.
He maintains that the generalist vendors will not be able to build a business intelligence toolset that is as rich as that a specialist company can, and nor can they operate as neutral players able to interface with a wide range of other software products.
Business Objects employs 1,200 developers – many in Europe, in its offices in Paris – and they are dedicated to writing business intelligence software.
“Customers’ fundamental point is that they want to have a pure play business intelligence vendor: the number one criteria is independence from the data source,” he says. “That neutrality is essential for an enterprise-wide solution.”
