The annals of analytic applications
As part of its enterprise analytic applications strategy, Business Objects has introduced the first three modules (sales, customer and campaign) in its Customer Intelligence suite, which is designed to optimize sales force productivity, customer profitability and marketing efficiency.
Customer Intelligence is the first application in Business Objects Analytics, which is expected to include a complete set of applications for the enterprise, including customer, product/service, supply chain and operations intelligence. All applications in the suite will be built using a new application framework, the Business Objects Application Foundation.
The Sales Analytics module enables organizations to understand and optimize their sales force, revenue and pipeline performance over time, reports the company. The Customer Analytics component is said to enable organizations to understand and optimize the value of their customers throughout the customer life cycle. Campaign Analytics is built to give organizations the ability to maximize marketing campaign performance.
The Application Foundation Framework can be used to customize packaged applications purchased from the company or to build custom analytic applications to solve a customer's specific business problem. It consists of:
- Application Builder, a development tool for building Web-based analytic applications;
- Advanced Analytic Engines, for performing set-based analysis, time series analysis and the specification and execution of advanced business rules; and
- Analytics Catalog, a collection of more than 70 pre-built templates that provide analysis techniques to be used as building blocks for creating analytic applications.
Sales Analytics 1.0 is available on Microsoft Windows NT and Sun Solaris. The customer and campaign modules are currently in beta and are expected to be available by the end of July. Application Foundation 2.1 runs on Windows NT and Sun Solaris.