Business Objects SA, the database query and reporting tools company today announces what it claims with confidence to be the first enterprise query, reporting and analysis tool for the web called WebIntelligence, previously codenamed Darwin. The company has moved four components of its eponymous fat front-end querying tool to the server, and uses a browser to act as a front end to a Java client application. Nothing actually resides on the client hardware. Business Objects has licensed Visigenic Software Inc’s VisiBroker ORB object request broker to link the components together. Business Objects will also resell VisiBroker for those customers that need an ORB. The tool uses the same semantic layer the fat client version uses to shield the users from the SQL queries, enabling them to choose query items from a menu. An HTML-compliant browser is sufficient to view reports, but a Java- enabled one is need to create reports. But customers will have to wait some time for WebIntelligence, as it only goes into beta later this month, and the company says it will ship a minimum of three months after that, and possibly later than that. The WebIntelligence server, which is written in C++ because the company couldn’t get the server performance from Java, will ship for Windows NT first, with sun Solaris Unix following next year. No prices yet. President and chief executive of Business Objects, Bernard Liautaud, is in the process of relocating from France to Palo Alto. The company has some 180 of its 600 employees in the US, thought development is done in France.
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