Briefs

eweek, By Renee Boucher Ferguson, December 3, 2007

As SAP moves to buy the company, Business Objects adds predictive analysis capabilities to its offerings. Business Objects may be in the process of being bought by enterprise software giant SAP, but that's not keeping the company from pushing forward. The company is moving ahead with plans to make business intelligence capabilities ubiquitous through the enterprise, moving beyond the typical 15 percent of BI users in IT to reach business users.

Business Objects announced a partnership Dec. 3 with SPSS that will have the latter company's predictive analytics technology integrated into Business Object's XI platform.

Business Objects hopes to reach two separate audiences through the integration of SPSS' technology: The lab coat folks and statisticians within the IT department who traditionally analyze data, and harder-to-reach business users.

For the traditional data mining user, Business Objects will integrate SPSS' Predictive Workbench into its XI platform. For business users, the company plans to add a wizard-like user interface to SPSS' predictive services technology to enable business users to tap current and historic data to create what-if scenarios.

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