BusinessObjects Goes Mobile
Product Coverage

BusinessObjects Mobile brings business intelligence from the desktop to end-user mobile devices. It does for business analysts and decision-makers what earlier applications did for delivery, repair and sales staffs. But instead of inventory, pricing and route information, BusinessObjects Mobile serves up market trends and analysis, customer satisfaction and profit data to traveling business users via any mobile PDA.

“Decision-makers at the management level don’t usually look at individual transactions, but they need the aggregation and analysis,” says Juliette Sultan, Business Objects’ global vice president of discovery and delivery business. “He doesn’t do the deal, but he needs to judge the forecasts” without being tied to the desktop, she explains.

BusinessObjects Mobile has the same SOA architecture, functionality, drill-down capability, and look and feel of the full application and can perform “mashups” of different data sets such as customer accounts and GPS location, Sultan says. However, she notes, its reports, charts, and dashboards have been resized for easy viewing on a smaller screen and don’t require extra bandwidth or storage because only the requested data (not the application) is transmitted for each retrieval. Yet changes can be made and reflected in real time, she adds.

BusinessObjects Mobile runs on the latest BusinessObjects 11 Version 2 platform and fully leverages all of its management, security, and scalability features. Similar to an add-on application, BusinessObjects Mobile runs on the same server and is quick to deploy, Sultan says.

“We think this is a great innovation and value for the end user,” she adds. “Especially the ease of mashing business intelligence with other information like GPS.”

BusinessObjects Mobile’s competitive differentiator is its delivery of actionable data, its SOA architecture, its ease of deployment and its platform management and security, Sultan says, adding that other offerings require additional servers and third-party software.

The closest competitive offering would be from Cognos.

Pricing is $400 per user and $48,500 per CPU in addition to the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform.

Jun2007, Software Magazine