SAP’s Acquisition of Business Objects Targets Oracle’s BI Position; Maybe LI As Well

The acquisition of Business Objects by SAP earlier this week was a move to put Oracle in its sights and I’m surprised it took SAP so long to acquire a BI player. After Oracle’s string of acquistions (Siebel, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Hyperion), SAP needed to make a move before Oracle had gobbled up every last BI solution provider. On the surface, there is nothing that would indicate that this radically alters the location intelligence (LI) marketplace. SAP can turn to ESRI directly or work through Business Objects’ Solution Kit for ESRI to find an LI solution. Business Objects has a relationship with Accruent, which offers a Real Estate Performance Management (RPM) system that has an embedded location technology engine by way of its acquisition of Vectiv in 2002. Vectiv was using MapInfo as its mapping engine at the time.

Oracle has already made the move to integrate not only its own spatial tools with its solutions but would readily integrate Google Maps if the client required it. SAP hasn’t demonstrated anything publicly with Google Maps (although I found a very poor video demo of Google Maps with what I think is NetWeaver) so it is likely that any solution that incorporates location technology will use ESRI technology.