IBM Corp said Friday it plans to resell Brio Technology Inc’s Enterprise product suite worldwide as part of its DecisionEdge for Sales Analysis (for SAP AG) applications. The deal will give developers the ability to build applications, using Brio tools, needed to analyze data held within SAP sales applications. IBM said it will resell the software under the terms of its already- established Brio logo and licensing agreement. Big Blue already sells Brio Enterprise as part of its Visual Warehouse family of decision support products. As part of the agreement, IBM will bundle Brio’s tools under a complete hardware, software, consulting and services offering. Chris Krejtak, executive VP of marketing said the deal was beneficial to companies that have standardized on SAP and who are looking for ways to maximize their return investment. Bundling Brio’s software with IBM’s DecisionEdge for Sales Analysis, SAP gives users over 40 of Brio’s Enterprise reports that cover the five most common types of sales analysis. But users can also use the tools to perform custom and ad hoc analysis of their SAP sales data. The news comes a week after press reports indicated friction between Brio, and another of IBM’s business intelligence partners, Business Objects (BO). Both vendors are members of IBM’s worldwide Solution Developer Program, through which Big Blue licenses third party software and bundles it with its own application offerings. But according to reports last week, Brio took umbrage with the wording of a press release issued by BO which, according to Krejtak, put them in a much better light with respect to their relationship with IBM. Krejtak said BO had included a paragraph which stated that IBM was reselling standalone versions of BO software, but under the developer program, Big Blue can only sell third-party software bundled alongside its own applications. IBM can’t do that, it can only sell the software in conjunction with its own products, he said, and we had a couple of situations where that statement was used against us by Business Objects. In the end, Krejtak said he highlighted the anomaly to IBM, who made BO retract the paragraph from the release. Krejtak added that Brio expects to make a series of other reseller announcements, with IBM and others, during the course of this year.
