SAP to Acquire Business Objects – will this mean analysis of RFID Data?

SAP announced on October 7^th 2007 that they have reached an agreement to acquire Business Objects. So another pure play BI vendor has gone; In March, Oracle took Business Objects rival Hyperion off the table for $3.3 billion. “The acquisition of Business Objects is in keeping with SAP’s stated strategy to double our addressable market by 2010 as announced in 2005,” said  SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. “SAP will accelerate its growth in the Business User segment, while complementing the company’s successful organic growth strategy.

Together, SAP and Business Objects intend to offer solutions to enable companies to strengthen decision processes, increase customer value and create sustainable competitive advantage through real-time, multi-dimensional business intelligence. SAP and Business Objects believe that customers will gain significant business benefits through the combination of new, innovative offerings of enterprise-wide business intelligence solutions along with embedded analytics in transactional applications.

 “The combination of Business Objects and SAP means that we can truly amplify the reach of Business Intelligence – from the C-suite to Main Street.” said Bernard Liautaud, Chairman and Founder of Business Objects.  

The two companies announced that Business Objects will operate as a stand-alone business as part of the SAP Group. Business Objects customers will continue to benefit from open, broad and integrated business intelligence solutions, independent of databases and applications. Business Objects will significantly enhance its Business Intelligence portfolio scope and capacity with SAP people, know-how and networks.

SAP said that the expertise and solutions from Business Objects would be complimentary to offerings SAP already provides for Business Users – including, for example, category leadership in Governance, Risk and Compliance; business intelligence in the SAP platform; as well as corporate performance management capabilities – including those recently added through tuck-in acquisitions from OutlookSoft and Pilot Software.

Could we see this acquisition see Business Objects being used to analyst RFID data?