SAP, the world’s largest provider of business software, has agreed to buy Business Objects for €4.8 billion euros ($6.8 billion).
Business Objects is a business intelligence software company with some 43,000 customers including over 80 percent of companies listed the Fortune 500.
Business intelligence software taps into an organization’s disparate data “to provide meaningful information and analysis to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for more effective decision making.”
Although both are pre-Web 2.0 software focused companies, SAP and Business Objects have started providing online services that are an extension of their main products. SAP has focused on online business collaboration, and has developed web based widgets that interact with SAP productivity tools.
Business Objects offers a number of online applications under the “BI 2.0” banner on its Business Objects Labs Web site. Tools include BI Annotator, a tool that combines external data feeds with the structured data in a data warehouse, and BI Desktop, for creating programs or widgets that display current BI information on the desktop.
(via AFP)