Business Objects Launches BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence
Delivers First Three Modules of New Analytic Application for Customer Intelligence: Sales Analytics, Customer Analytics, and Campaign Analytics
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 10, 2001-- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ - news), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced BusinessObjects(TM) Customer Intelligence, the first in a series of analytic applications the company plans to deliver in support of its enterprise analytic applications strategy, announced in December of 2000. BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence lets sales and marketing managers improve the performance of their business by providing analytics that help optimize sales force productivity, customer profitability, and marketing efficiency.
BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence is composed of a series of modules. The first three of these modules, announced today, are BusinessObjects Sales Analytics, BusinessObjects Customer Analytics, and BusinessObjects Campaign Analytics.
BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence is the first application in BusinessObjects Analytics, the company's suite of integrated enterprise analytic applications. BusinessObjects Analytics is planned to include a complete set of applications for the enterprise, including customer, product/service, supply chain, and operations intelligence. All applications in the BusinessObjects Analytics suite will be built using a common analytic application framework, BusinessObjects Application Foundation, which the company also announced today.
``Today's companies understand the importance of being customer-centric and to this end are collecting customer data. However, they still face the task of making sense of this mountain of information to understand what the customer wants and how to better deliver it,'' said Charles Nicholls, group vice president of the Business Objects analytic applications division. ``With BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence, we are providing a best-practice application to give organizations a running start on analyzing customer, sales, and marketing data.''
BusinessObjects Sales Analytics
BusinessObjects Sales Analytics enables organizations to understand and optimize their sales force, revenue, and pipeline performance over time. Sales Analytics empowers business managers with an unprecedented ability to explore sales data, track and analyze key sales metrics, and use this analysis to drive an optimal sales process.
Sales Analytics provides insight into revenue and cost-drivers of the business, thus a user will quickly see if the sales force is spending too much effort on low-value deals, or if the revenue stream has high exposure by being composed of just a few very high-value deals. In other examples, a user could see what percentage of target his district has reached compared with the same time last year, or determine the impact lapsed customers will have on this quarter's revenues.
BusinessObjects Customer Analytics
BusinessObjects Customer Analytics enables organizations to understand and optimize the value of their customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Users track and analyze key customer segments and loyalty metrics and use this analysis to create an optimal customer acquisition, development, and retention process. With Customer Analytics, business managers can now see critical changes within the customer base and quickly take action to improve the status of those customers. For example, a user might identify high-value customers who are spending less over several months, and feed that group of customers into a campaign management system to run a retention program.
Customer Analytics measures customer value at both the individual and segment level, enabling users to understand the changing behavior of groups of customers over time. Users can even drill down to the profile of individual customers to discover their signature, that is, the pattern of their individual behavior, segment membership, and value.
BusinessObjects Campaign Analytics
Campaign Analytics enables organizations to analyze and maximize marketing campaign performance. Using more than 40 pre-packaged best practice analytics such as ``return on investment summary'' or ``cross-sell analysis'' users can track the performance of campaigns over time and use this analysis to create more effective marketing and merchandising promotions.
With Campaign Analytics, users track campaign respondents and prospects throughout the campaign and into the customer lifecycle to determine the critical success factors of marketing campaigns. For example, a user could track what acquisition sources provided the most gold segment customers, or how the previous year's retention campaign influenced the customers that responded. Users can then optimize existing programs and plan more effective campaigns for the future. In addition, Campaign Analytics can transfer a customer segment list to an organization's campaign management or call center to enable fast closed-loop action.
Advantages of BusinessObjects Analytics
The key advantages offered by BusinessObjects Analytics are:
Packaged best practice. BusinessObjects Analytics contains analytics that represent ``best practice'' in their respective domains. For example, BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence provides advanced customer segmentation and segment migration analysis techniques that represent the cutting edge of customer relationship management. By using BusinessObjects Analytics, organizations benefit from Business Objects ten years of experience working with leading companies to meet their business intelligence needs. Ultimately, this means that businesses can move ahead faster, without having to re-invent what others already know, saving them time and money, and helping them use advanced analytics as entry barriers to strengthen their competitive position.
Rapid time to deployment. BusinessObjects Analytics is a suite of pre-packaged applications that contain database schema, semantic metadata, and typically between 40 and 60 analytics. Because the applications are prepackaged, they can be deployed more quickly and therefore rapidly deliver competitive advantage. Rapid deployment reduces the financial payback period for the application investment, so customers can see return on investment (ROI) much faster than with traditional approaches. For example, one early BusinessObjects Analytics customer attained payback within 14 days. Prepackaging also reduces the application's total cost of ownership (TCO). BusinessObjects Analytics thus delivers faster payback, higher return on investment, and a lower cost of ownership -- making it a very attractive investment from a financial point of view.
Consistent enterprise view. BusinessObjects Analytics is built around a single, consistent, enterprise data model. This means that users will see a single consistent view of the enterprise when performing analysis. When analyzing their business, users want ``one truth'' so that, for example, total revenue in the sales system exactly equals total revenue in the product line revenue reporting system. Today's stove-piped analytic applications cannot deliver this consistent enterprise view because they take a fragmented approach to the problem. Because BusinessObjects Analytics has been built from the ground up with a single, enterprise-wide data model, it can and will deliver the ``one truth'' that business users seek.
Management dashboards. All BusinessObjects Analytics application modules will include management dashboards, designed to give executives and senior managers the big picture, ``cockpit'' type view of the business that they desire. In today's demanding economic climate, executive management increasingly wants to run business ``by the numbers.'' Major corporations are increasingly adopting dashboard-type methodologies such as digital cockpits or balanced scorecards as key strategic initiatives. With BusinessObjects Analytics, these organizations will be able to quickly and easily provide the dashboards that their executives need.
Built on common foundation. All applications in the BusinessObjects Analytics suite will be built on a common analytic application framework, BusinessObjects Application Foundation, which can be used to customize packaged applications purchased from Business Objects or to build custom analytic applications to solve a customer's specific business problem. BusinessObjects Analytics thus provides organizations with a ``build and buy'' solution where they can build some analytic applications, buy others, and have them all work together -- looking, feeling, and acting in exactly the same way. (Editor's note: please see related press release Business Objects Launches BusinessObjects Application Foundation, dated July 10, 2001.)
Platforms and Availability
BusinessObjects Sales Analytics 1.0 is generally available on Microsoft Windows NT and Sun Solaris. BusinessObjects Customer Analytics 1.0 and BusinessObjects Campaign Analytics 1.0 are currently in beta and are expected to be generally available by the end of July. |
