Business Objects looks to boost the bottom line

E-business intelligence (e-BI) vendor Business Objects has launched a product it says will boost the ability of companies to tailor their data warehouses to fit the real-world needs of end-users, thereby increasing loyalty and profitability. The launch of BusinessObjects Auditor, a Web-based business intelligence (BI) assessment tool built on existing Business Objects products, is designed to specifically help customers tune their BI deployments to better meet user needs, and aims to identify trends and predict changes on the business landscape. Business Objects creates the software, which enables organisations to access, analyse and share information in the e-business environment. Business intelligence (BI) technology allows companies to digest and analyse volumes of information to maintain and build upon existing customer relationships, and make sound business decisions. "The growth in scale and maturity of e-BI solutions from workgroups to enterprise-wide deployments has placed new demands on IT departments," said Business Objects MD Gary Lawrence.

"Especially with extranet deployments, system administrators are more distant from end-users and lack insight into the fact that they are using the e-BI extranet."

Business Objects is leading the local e-BI industry in both enterprise and extranet deployments. Lawrence, whose company is looking to boost already impressive 40% year-on-year growth in SA, believes the country is "ripe for an e-BI revolution" as the existing ERP base in local organisations has laid an ideal foundation for the rapid roll-out of BI solutions.

The product takes advantage of the ease of use, security, scalability, and extensibility of BusinessObjects 2000 to offer Business Objects customers a unique look into their e-BI deployment through key indicators and reports.

Companies can use Auditor to gauge peak usage points and increase server power to maintain service levels. In addition, a company looking to turn its data warehouse into a profit centre via an extranet deployment could use information from Auditor to see the most requested information and then generate new revenue opportunities by making additional billable reports available.

Companies can provide self-service access to the most desired information in an increasingly tailored solution, thus increasing customer service and customer loyalty.

BusinessObjects Auditor uses dashboards and predefined key indicators to allow users to monitor user activity and access rights and view information on resources such as documents, categories and universes, as well as data about the system such as server load and response time. Administrators can customise their indicators to monitor specific focus areas.

"Monitoring the e-BI system is particularly critical in extranet deployments, where the end-users accessing the data are external to the host company," said Lawrence. "Because the data users are located outside of the company - often at the organisation`s best business partners and customers - the level of service and performance of the data warehouse is that much more critical."

BusinessObjects Auditor provides more than 120 reports in daily, weekly and monthly formats to make it easy for IT users to analyse trends. Users can slice, dice and pivot on these reports to explore the system information in greater depth, and do impact analysis to see the effects of possible changes to documents and universes before implementing them.

Based on this information and analysis, IT administrators can better decide how to tune their e-BI solution to fit the real-world needs of end-users. For example, deleting or archiving unused reports and objects makes the e-BI system easier for users to navigate and provides quicker access to the desired information. And by tracking the most frequent queries, database administrators can address the need for aggregate tables, speeding up the refreshing of the most popular reports.

"Being able to see what objects and reports are most frequently used will help us tune the BI deployment and help companies offer more personalised customer service," said Lawrence.