By Dan Jones and Simon Goodley
Unconfirmed rumors were reaching us Friday to the effect that the entire software development team working on Business Object SA’s WebIntelligence software had walked out. The 160-strong Paris, France-based team are said to have jumped ship just as the latest beta of the product is due to hit the streets. Tony Hayworth, marketing director in the firm’s London office said, I believe that this rumor is untrue. Earlier in the day, other sources at the company had been unable to deny the rumors.
There also appears to be some confusion over the size of the team working on the flagship software product. The company had earlier put the size of the team at between 250 and 300 people. Hayworth said that that the discrepancy may have arisen if the support staff on the French team were included with the core R&D developers. There was no indication of why such a walk-out might have taken place.
Business Objects claims that the WebIntelligence program is the first web decision support (DSS) tool designed for the e-business intelligence market. The program is a multi-tier, thin-client system provides ad hoc query, reporting, and analysis of information stored in datawarehouses, data marts, and packaged business applications. Business Objects say that the distributed architecture and 100% Java query applet structure of the program eliminates the need for client-side installation and maintenance of application software and database middleware.
