My topic today is...

Business Objects, which may seem a bit of odd choice from someone who writes mainly about data warehouse design and often Oracle. True I can, and do do the whole BI piece, but again, my preferences are heavily Oracle infused.

Business Objects has hit the press a few times in recent days. First, the French press had the 'BO is looking for a buyer' story running but not citing any sources (which might mean there's nothing to it) saying that investment bankers have been retained to find a buyer; five companies are thought to be interested, but only SAP was named in the article. Of course, this could well be the traditional end-of-the-pure-plays story that comes out every few months (not that the likes of Business Objects and Cognos are that pure these days as they add non-core functionality to prop up market share); but now there is only a small handful of vendors left with the other majors disappearing into database vendors and the like.

The second story is about the On-Demand offer that Business Objects is pushing. On the face of it a web-based, zero-footprint in your data centre system sounds attractive, and indeed they make a great play of how independent you can be be of the constrains of your in-house IT organisation.  But in reality this comes down to hosting, Business Objects has moved into the data warehouse hosting business. Not going into the relative merits of in-house, outsourced and hosted as a way of offering a service and having worked in an IT services company I can see great positives in having outsiders feed and water the servers, I worry that the BI on demand is too much like the mythical blackbox data warehouse, that is the one-size-fits-all model. I also have questions around regulation and compliance and data segregation.