As most people who ready my blog's know I am in the process of moving to the APJ region (more in this post).
One of the main reasons that made me finally decide to move out East was that there was a large BusinessObjects (BOBJ) community and over 70 % of those customers were not running SAP.
The agnostic BOBJ shop is the world I have come from being a long time user of BusinessObjects, Sybase and various ETL tools over the years. The agnostic world was almost "out of place" in the SAP existence but now with SAP becoming a database company and HANA been used as a "side-car" approach the SAP world is also getting exposed to the hands on data movement and modelling expertise needed which was typically handled by BW.
While presenting at both the SAP Insider Event in Singapore and the SAUG Summit in Sydney recently I generally always open up by asking attendees if they are "Classic BOBJ customers" or are running BW. In both events there was about a 95 % of people attending my sessions that run BW so there seems to be a huge disconnect of the original BusinessObjects install base and hence the title of this blog post...
So ... if you are reading this and don't associate your-self with SAP then please read further to see why the acquisition of BusinessObjects almost 6 years ago could be a great thing for either your career or company.
SAP, especially in the APJ region headed up by kurt.bilafer, are doing all they can to help assist the original BusinessObjects customer to move across to SAP "paper" so to speak. Have a look at this link and video below about the Analytics Plus program.
To me one of the most compelling reason to move across to SAP pricing is so that you can take advantage of the BusinessObjects Analytics Edition bundles. I did a long write up about it in this blog post.
The key is that now as BOBJ customers you get access to a world class ETL tool (no more horrific hand written SQL ETL jobs :shock: ) and a best of breed analytics database all for a fraction of the cost of acquiring it stand alone.
If you are feeling lucky then please also do enter the Analytics Makeover competition ( only for folks in APJ) where you can free BI4.1 upgrade thanks to the Accenture and EV Technologies.
I have not yet even gone into the many advantages of upgrading to BI4 yet and there are many a post blog relating to that. With that in mind here is a great post by timo.elliott2 outlining all the new features and resources for BI4.1
If you are still not convinced then why not sign up for the free, yes free, 10 part webinar series called #BetterBOBJAPJ that is sponsored by SAP and
EV Technologies. All sessions will be run by SAP Press Authors and/or SAP Mentors and you will be sure to have a good understanding of the new offerings by the end of the series.
My final thought on all of this is that if you are a "Classic BOBJ" customer then after 6 years it really is time to come and say hi. With SAP pushing the HANA and database message the Enterprise Data Warehouse world is opening up within SAP and it would be great to have like minded people in the community to compare war stories with...
Looking forward to hearing from all the BOBJ stalwarts out there !
