Business Objects Ads Land in Ottawa
Section: 04. Business Intelligence
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Excerpted from ComputerWire
Business Objects SA is taking on rival Cognos Inc in its back yard, quite literally. The French business intelligence software provider has bought three advertising locations at Ottawa airport, which by no coincidence happens to be Cognos' home town.
The ads also have the cheek to directly attack Cognos for not offering integrated products. The poster shows a bald, smiling employee casually leaning against an office cubicle with a super-imposed tag line reading: "Meet the CEO of Cubicle 36, Building 10... His company didn't wait for an integrated platform from Cognos."
Business Objects says the posters are part of a new global ad campaign to better educate customers about integrated BI products.
Business Objects spent the best part of last year integrating technology acquired from Crystal Decisions in the summer of 2003. The Business Objects XI platform, which was released earlier this year, completed the integration roadmap to schedule according to Business Objects.
Meanwhile Cognos' next generation BI platform, dubbed Series 8, is due out later this year. Series 8 will shift all of Cognos' business intelligence tools to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). So far ReportNet is the only Cognos tool to be built from the ground up on the Series 8 code base architecture. Cognos' PowerPlay and other event-notification products will be re-architected to follow suit in the full Series 8 release.
In an email to ComputerWire, a Business Objects spokesman said: "Cognos has been promoting the myth that they are integrated for far too long, and we are concerned that their customers are not getting the best BI for their dollar."
Cognos begs to differ, saying that the Series 8 BI platform already exists: "It has, ever since July 2003 when ReportNet was launched," a representative told ComputerWire some months ago. Cognos also says that its PowerPlay 7.3 release last year "also runs on top of the same [Series 8] architecture." But officials admit that it hasn't yet been architected as SOA.
"Customers wanting PowerPlay and ReportNet together on the single, Series 8, SOA have been able to do so since last August...despite what our competition would tell you."
It will be interesting to see if Cognos responds with ads of its own at airports at San Jose, California and Paris - cities where Business Objects maintains its dual headquarters.
