Bernard Liautaud: We are unable to comment on the details for regulatory reasons. However, we have worked on the roadmap for four-and-a-half months and it has now been defined. We will talk about the details at the beginning of January, but we will continue to support both products. At the same time we are integrating the two products and moving towards a unified platform. Crystal Decisions enjoys strong enterprise reporting capabilities, while Business Objects focuses on query analysis and enterprise performance management.

Where is business intelligence heading?

BI is moving from portal-centric and report-centric technology to dashboard-centric and matrix-centric technology, and we are still at the beginning of that phase. Dashboards, scorecards, and matrix management allow firms to set goals and targets and move them across the entire organisation. Moving from goals to action is the cornerpiece of business intelligence.

And how will this affect firms?

We will see the democratisation of data. BI will become ubiquitous, and firms will roll it out onto many more desktops. More and more staff should have instantaneous and easy access to core data, but only with a strong information delivery platform. Dashboards, which chart business performance, are very easy to implement and can be put in the hands of hundreds of employees. In the past they were so customised and complex, that only the chief executive could have one.

Don't you think that people will continue to use spreadsheets out of habit?

It is true that people are used to doing things on Excel, but IT departments and chief executives are behind BI. They are trying to eliminate the local creation of data as it does not scale well. Excel is a great personal productivity tool, but not an enterprise-reporting tool. Various corporate governance regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and the Combined Code of Corporate Governance in the UK, mean that firms want access to better-quality and accurate enterprise data. This technology has now moved from great-to-have to must-have out of legal necessity.

Should firms combine best-of-breed tools to get the best out of BI?

Companies will standardise on one solution set. Many pockets of business intelligence can result in high costs of ownership, as well as the inability to share information between different silos of data, which means that an organisation will be unable to create that single version of the truth. At the same time, organisations do not want to deal with many suppliers, as they want as few strategic relationships as possible.

Following many acquisitions in the BI sector, will the consolidation trend continue?

It is very possible this trend will continue because it gets harder and harder for small companies to do well in this business.

Will BI tool vendors be bought by the database giants eager to get into that market?

Firms looking to move into the business intelligence market will not be successful because business intelligence is now a business in itself. The leader of this market will be an expert in that technology rather than in databases or applications. At the same time, firms want database and application independence when searching for a BI solution, as they have many different databases and applications within their firms. Businesses need to be able to access all of these different databases seamlessly.

ABOUT BERNARD LIAUTAUD

Bernard Liautaud is chief executive and chairman of Business Objects.

Liautaud co-founded the firm in 1990, and took it public on Nasdaq in September 1994. It was the first French software firm listed in the US.

Previously, Liautaud was marketing manager for Oracle in France.

He has also worked as deputy scientific attaché for the French Embassy in Washington DC.