Officials are calling BusinessObjects XI, which stands for Extreme Insight, as one of the most significant releases in the firm’s history.
It’s the ‘Big Kahuna’ for us, Chris Caren, vice president of corporate product marketing at San Jose, California-based Business Objects, told ComputerWire.
Significantly, XI wraps up the Crystal product integration roadmap which the company first detailed in January last year. Business Objects bought Crystal Decisions Inc in the summer of 2003 and faced the daunting challenge of integrating two broad and market-leading BI and reporting suites.
While the BusinessObjects 6.5 release last summer delivered front-end integration, XI now completes the back-end portion by delivering a single repository and unified security and administration schemes across the two integrated product lines.
We’ve taken the best of both products and re-engineered how it looks, Caren said. It’s notable that most of the administration interfaces are built around the Crystal Enterprise product line.
But XI doesn’t just stop at integration. It also adds new functionality that Business Objects says hopes will drive broader use of BI across all levels of the enterprise.
In this release we’re focusing on the ‘other 85%’ of business and casual users that need access to intelligence. XI is designed to bring BI to these users rather than them having to go out and pull in BI, Caren said.
It’s true that most BI vendors have been harking on about BI for the masses for several years now. But Business Objects XI boasts several groundbreaking innovations that officials believe will break down the traditional barriers holding back wide-scale BI adoption.
This includes: deeper integration with the Microsoft Office desktop, enhanced end-user metadata delivery, and collaborative reporting.
The most visible difference in XI is its Live Office interface which surfaces BI functionality within Microsoft Office applications like Excel, Word and even PowerPoint presentations. Users can perform BI functions directly within Office documents that are linked directly to XI’s core security and management schemes. Business Objects also offers an SDK to help developers embed BI into existing Office applications.
XI really embraces Office and encourages BI users to stay in this environment, Caren said.
Another key feature of XI is its BI Encyclopedia which delivers technical and business metadata for end-users that provide context around raw BI data – such as its source, calculation logic, and so on. A nifty guided analysis feature suggests how the data or report can be used most effectively by recommending next-step actions. It also prompts users towards related reports in the context of a given report or analysis.
The suite also comes with collaborative functions like threaded discussions and shared analysis that are made part and parcel of dashboards, scorecards and reports.
Significant platform enhancements have also been implemented around XI’s new service oriented architecture, including automatic fail-over and the intelligent balancing of processing loads across server resources.
XI has been available since mid-December, but its official launch is this week. Business Objects will engage in a 30-day, 18 city whistle-stop tour across the world as part of the launch.
Caren says the upgrade from existing Crystal or BusinessObjects customers will be automated and clean.
The initial release of XI runs on Windows platforms. Support for Unix (including HP-UX, AIX and Solaris) and Linux will follow in the first half of this year.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made between XI and rival Cognos Inc’s Series 8 BI platform (which also feature a completely new SOA) that is expected early this year.
