A Comparison White Paper by MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy vs. Business Objects

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Patent Information

This product is patented. One or more of the following patents may apply to the product sold herein: U.S. Patent Nos. 6,154,766, 6,173,310, 6,260,050, 6,263,051, 6,269,393, 6,279,033, 6,501,832, 6,567,796, 6,587,547, 6,606,596,

6,658,093, 6,658,432, 6,662,195, 6,671,715, 6,691,100, 6,694,316, 6,697,808, 6,704,723, 6,707,889, 6,741,980, 6,765,997, 6,768,788, 6,772,137, 6,788,768, 6,792,086, 6,798,867, 6,801,910, 6,820,073, 6,829,334, 6,836,537,

6,850,603, 6,859,798, 6,873,693, 6,885,734, 6,888,929, 6,895,084, 6,940,953, 6,964,012, 6,977,992, 6,996,568, 6,996,569, 7,003,512, 7,010,518, 7,016,480, 7,020,251, 7,039,165, 7,082,422, 7,113,993, 7,127,403, 7,174,349,

7,194,457, 7,197,461, 7,228,303, 7,260,577, 7,266,181 and 7,272,212. Other patent applications are pending.

I. Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

II. MicroStrategy Perspective on the SAP Acquisition of Business Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

III. MicroStrategy – A Market Proven, Industrial-Strength Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

MicroStrategy 8 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Why Companies Choose MicroStrategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

IV. Comparison of MicroStrategy and Business Objects on Key BI Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

V. Critical Questions to Ask When Evaluating MicroStrategy and Business Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

VI. Top 10 Points to Consider When Migrating from the Business Objects Version 5

and 6 to XI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

MicroStrategy vs. Business Objects

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1 The OLAP Survey 6- Author: Nigel Pendse http://www.survey.com/olap/

I. Executive Summary

In the business intelligence marketplace, MicroStrategy competes vigorously with vendors such as Business Objects.

At first glance, both MicroStrategy 8 and Business Objects XI Release 2 can be used to report and analyze corporate

data, providing business insight to organizations. However, once customers implement these business intelligence

(BI) solutions, they recognize critical differences derived from the architecture and paradigms of these very different

technologies. Key architectural differences affect the variety of report types, the breadth and depth of analysis, as well

as the cost required to maintain the BI application. The technology and architectural differences result in disparities

in performance, scalability, usability, efficiency and reliability of the system; all of which impact user adoption and

ultimately, the success of the BI project.

Ironically, as user and business requirements have become more complex, IT budgets have come under increasing

pressure. Business intelligence applications must now be developed, deployed and maintained with the minimum of

IT resources, while serving more users across the global organization. Clearly, the BI architecture can be either a liability

or an asset to IT departments. A technologically superior architecture will meet all the needs of the end user, while

minimizing the amount of IT maintenance and administration. An inferior architecture will require redundant and

repetitive administration, and the constant development of one-off workarounds.

MicroStrategy technology is based on a completely relational object-oriented metadata model that insulates the BI

application from changes in the data and business environment. This centralized and reusable metadata is self-

maintaining and adapts real-time to changes in user requirements, data schemas and business logic. In MicroStrategy,

report developers do not need to duplicate metadata definitions across reports as they do in Business Objects. This

duplication increases the cost of ownership and change management effort of the BI application. With MicroStrategy,

IT departments have an industrial-strength administration infrastructure on which they can rely to maintain their BI

applications with ever increasing economies of scale.

Securing corporate data is a top priority in today’s enterprise BI applications. Drug prescription records, human

resources records, cell phone call records and financial transactions are just a few types of sensitive data. The security

requirements become even more urgent when information is distributed via extranets or when users drill from the

high-level performance reports to detailed transaction information, anywhere in the data warehouse. MicroStrategy

provides airtight security with 128-bit end-to-end encryption and cell level protection applied automatically across all

reports and all data. Business Objects does not provide the same level of security across the entire product set out-of-

the-box and requires security setup and maintenance from multiple locations.

Business Objects has pursued a product strategy based on technology acquisitions which can be directly correlated

with its lower levels of customer loyalty1. Conversely, MicroStrategy has concentrated on a single product architecture

that spans reporting, ad-hoc query, analysis, proactive notification, scorecards and dashboards under the same user

interface and metadata, thus ensuring a single “version of the truth.” Business Objects XI Release 2 still requires heavy

desktop dependence and is still comprised of many different architectures and interfaces. In Business Objects, much

development must be done on the desktop using either the Crystal Reports developer tool for reporting or Business

Objects Desktop Intelligence for ad-hoc query. Users will need Web Intelligence for ad-hoc query, will need Voyager,

an OLAP viewer, for OLAP analysis, will need Crystal Reports Explorer for formatted reports, will need Dashboard

Manager and Xcelsius for dashboards, and will need Performance Manager for scorecards. A greater number of

different architectures means more maintenance effort for IT. A greater number of user interfaces means more

training for end users, elevating the total cost of ownership of the business intelligence application.

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For over a decade, MicroStrategy customers have built thousands of mission-critical BI applications with

MicroStrategy technology. With an administration-friendly architecture, robust security, a self-service zero-footprint

Web interface, and proven user and data scalability, MicroStrategy 8 is the only business intelligence vendor to

obtain the highest technology score from the leading industry analyst firm’s Vendor Ratings. The most respected

independent survey in the industry, The OLAP Survey 6, stated that MicroStrategy surpassed Business Objects in

delivering higher business value and better technical support resulting in the highest customer loyalty ratings across

any BI vendor.

This document discusses in detail the important characteristics of the MicroStrategy 8 architecture, the key

differences between MicroStrategy 8 and Business Objects XI Release 2, and the critical questions that should be

asked when evaluating Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Conclusions are rooted in publicly available documents

and not subject to individual interpretation.

II. MicroStrategy’s Perspective on the SAP Acquisition of

Business Objects

In October 2007, SAP announced its plans to acquire Business Objects for $4.8 Billion ($6.8 Billion). As a leading

provider of business intelligence (BI) software, MicroStrategy has closely followed this announcement. We would

like to share our perspectives on the impact of this acquisition on the BI market.

A ShAkeout in the Bi MArket

We believe that this acquisition is a continuation of a shakeout process in the BI market. Although Business

Objects has grown to considerable size through a long series of acquisitions, these acquisitions have masked some

fundamental weaknesses in its technology offerings. Business Objects’ BI products are fragmented, lacking both

scalability and integration, making them inappropriate for many applications in the new generation of enterprise BI.

In the markets for Departmental BI and Small to Medium-Sized Business (SMB) BI, Business Objects faces increasingly

stiff competition from Microsoft and various start-up BI companies who have targeted the same space. In the

Budgeting/Planning/Forecasting market space, Business Objects faces difficult competition from the more established

products from Hyperion (now Oracle), Adaytum (now Cognos), and from organic offerings from the ERP vendors.

MicroStrategy is well positioned for success in the market as a leading pure-play BI vendor with a fully organic

architecture. Our niche is “industrial-strength” BI which is ideally suited for large organizations with vast amounts

of data, large user populations, and who need end-user analytical self-service. We have maintained our consistent

focus on this market, and we continue to relentlessly enhance our technology to provide a high level of service to

our customers.

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iMportAnt QueStionS to ASk ABout thiS AcQuiSition

1. Why was Business objects so eager to be acquired?

We believe that Business Objects needed to be acquired because it had accumulated such a large collection of

non-integrated technologies in a market where organic technical integration is essential for providing enterprise

BI solutions. Business Objects’ array of disparate technologies has diluted its focus, resulting in poor license

results across its product lines. Business Objects needed a large buyer, such as SAP, to act as a lifeline to give it

a new, and more pliable, market in which to pitch its range of disparate products.

2. Did SAp rush into the purchase of Business objects?

Some analysts suggest that SAP rushed into the purchase of Business Objects and paid a premium price, even

though Business Objects warned that Q3 revenues and earnings would be well below Wall Street estimates.

We question whether the acquisition was a defensive move by SAP to prevent a competitor from acquiring

Business Objects. If there was no competition, SAP would have waited for Business Objects to announce its Q3

results and potentially purchased the company for significantly less than the $6.8 Billion purchase price.

If the Business Objects acquisition was part of a well-considered acquisition strategy and strategic plan, then

why would SAP have purchased OutlookSoft just two months earlier? OutlookSoft competes directly with

Business Objects’ Cartesis.

If SAP rushed into the purchase, it likely did so without fully analyzing the quality of Business Objects’ product

set, Business Objects’ competitive position in the market, and the inability of Business Objects’ sales force to

position all of its overlapping products. The other hidden liability for SAP is the pervasive difficulty that Business

Objects’ customers have experienced in migrating to XI Release 2. A large percentage of Business Objects’

customers still have not successfully migrated to XI Release 2 after more than two years of the product being

on the market.

3. Will Business objects’ customers be forced to undergo even more major migrations?

Unless SAP maintains Business Objects purely as a portfolio investment, it is likely that Business Objects’ various

architectures will be changed to help them integrate with the more cohesive SAP suite. The implication is that

several major migrations are ahead for Business Objects’ customers. Many of these customers, who are not also

SAP customers, will be forced to undergo these migrations with no direct benefit.

By contrast, MicroStrategy customers have not undergone any architecture migrations since the major re-architecting

of MicroStrategy that was completed in 2000 with MicroStrategy 7. Our new modern and organic architecture is

expected to have a long life ahead.

4. Will Business objects’ technology become even less applicable for data warehousing?

As SAP influences Business Objects’ product set to be more aligned with the needs of SAP customers and SAP

applications, the design priorities of Business Objects’ products will change. They will become less focused on the

needs for standard data warehouses. While Business Objects and SAP will probably claim that Business Objects’

technology will be optimized for both SAP BI and enterprise data warehouses, the hard fact is that modern

enterprise software is so complicated that it can only be optimized for one major architecture.

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“Other acquisitions that SAP has made have tended to end up being engulfed in its maw and never seeing the

light of day again. Worse, the technology it acquires tends to end up being specifically targeted at SAP customers

even when the company has said that won’t happen. For example, when SAP acquired TopTier it was quite explicit

that company’s product would continue to be marketed to non-SAP customers. And was it? In theory perhaps, in

practice no.” Philip Howard, Director of Research - Technology, Bloor Research, October 7, 2007

By contrast, MicroStrategy’s development priorities are driven by the needs of enterprise BI, the cornerstone of

which is high performance support for very large relational data warehouses.

5. how will Business objects and SAp reconcile their overlapping technologies? What will happen to the

customers as products are reconciled?

There is significant overlap within the SAP and Business Objects’ product suites. Customers with products that

are undergoing integration will face painful migrations. Customers with products that are not being integrated

face the likelihood that SAP will slow development on those products, and ultimately “sunset” them.

Analysts have expressed concerns about SAP’s ability to produce a comprehensive product road map in a timely fashion.

“Until both companies go through a formal product road map exercise, which may take at least a few months,

it is unclear which products will remain front and center of SAP’s Performance Management strategy and which

ones will be relegated to the ‘second class citizen’ status.” Boris Evelson, Forrester, October 7, 2007

consider these significant areas of product overlap between the two companies:

PRODUCT CATEGORY BUSINESS OBJECTS SAP

Dashboards and Scorecards Xcelsius, Dashboard Manager, Crystal Vision Visual Composer, Web Application Designer

Query, Analysis and Reporting Web Intelligence, OLAP Intelligence, Voyager,

Crystal Reports, Cartesis, Inxight Software

BEx Web Analyzer, BEx Analyzer, ABAP™,

BEx Report Designer, Pilot

Office Plug-ins Live Office BEx Analyzer

Application Infrastructure Nsite (on demand), crystalreports.com

Vertical and Horizontal Apps

SAP® xApps™

Vertical and Horizontal Apps

Desktop Design Tools Desktop Intelligence, Designer BEx Query Designer

Portals InfoView SAP NetWeaver® Portal

Performance Management or

CPM

SRC Software, ALG Software, Cartesis SEM-BCS, BPS, Netweaver® BI-Integrated

Planning, OutlookSoft, Netweaver® BI

Advanced Planner and Optimizer, mySAP

ERP Express Planning

Master Data Management Metadata Manager, Composer SAP NetWeaver® Master Data Management

ETL / EII / EIM Data Integrator (Acta), Data Federator

(Medience), Data Quality (Firstlogic,

FUZZY! Informatik)

Data Extraction routines to populate SAP BI

Mobile Mobile Interactive Viewing (InfoView Mobile) SAP NetWeaver® Mobile

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By contrast, MicroStrategy offers its customers a unified architecture with plug-n-play modules that allows its users

to start with small, narrowly focused BI applications, and grow to a fully integrated architecture that scales across

an enterprise. With MicroStrategy, each new modular addition adds dramatic new functionality, and incrementally

improves value to everything they have previously deployed.

6. What are the chances of a smooth integration for Business objects and SAp?

Business Objects and SAP appear to be a cultural mismatch on several levels:

• Applications company vs. platform company

• SAP is an applications company to its very core. It has a questionable track record marketing and selling

platform technology.

• Business Objects’ platform priorities and architecture will ultimately be subservient to SAP’s application

priorities since SAP’s applications business generates many times the revenue of Business Objects.

• Departmental vs. enterprise culture

• Business Objects’ sales and engineering has focused on expedient solutions for departmental solutions.

• SAP’s sales and engineering has focused on cohesive solutions at enterprise-scale.

• SAp has an unproven track record of integrating third party platform technology

• Since inception, SAP has pursued an organic growth strategy and has never made an acquisition of this

magnitude. “We believe there will be significant integration risks since SAP has not made an acquisition

of this size before.” Pacific Growth Equities, October 7, 2007

MicroStrAtegy’S coMMitMent to our cuStoMerS AnD to BuSineSS intelligence

MicroStrategy is now the second largest independent BI provider in the market. As an independent company,

we listen to our BI customers for our direction – not Waldorf GE, not Redmond WA, not Redwood Shores CA.

MicroStrategy is entirely focused on BI technology, not financial applications, not ETL, not EII, and not MDM,

because we believe that there is still a lot of hard innovative work to be done before BI achieves its full potential.

That work requires intense focus, not caretaking.

As an independent BI vendor, MicroStrategy’s technology will continue to be optimized to interoperate with a

diversity of market-leading technologies including DBMSs, ETL, server platforms, portal platforms, development

tools, and web browsers, because this is the same diversity that exists in our customers’ real environments. Our

intention is not to lock customers into a single technology stack.

As an independent vendor, we are able to dedicate 100% of our resources and energy into making each one of our

customer’s BI implementations highly successful. MicroStrategy is committed to delivering the best-engineered BI

technology to make our customers successful – helping them run their businesses more efficiently, more profitably,

with lower risk, and with faster growth.

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III. MicroStrategy – A Market Proven, Industrial-Strength Technology

The MicroStrategy architecture is the result of 4 years of development and 5 years of subsequent refinement, driven by

the needs of the most demanding BI applications in the world. MicroStrategy is an industrial-strength BI technology,

uniquely capable of serving BI application requirements characterized by the largest scale, most sophisticated analytics,

highest report volumes, and most users. This caliber of BI technology is now being sought after by companies, not

just for their most demanding BI applications, but for the purpose of hosting all of their BI applications – standardizing

all BI onto a single, highly-functional and economical architecture and reaping significant economies of scale and

enterprise-wide consistency.

Unlike BI Suites offered by other vendors like Business Objects, MicroStrategy offers the only organically grown BI

architecture. All of the MicroStrategy 8 components were expressly built to work within a unified architecture and

not as separate standalone products or acquired technologies that were subsequently joined together.

MicroStrAtegy 8 overvieW

Launched in 2005, MicroStrategy 8 offers the latest in technical innovations with over 2,000 enhancements across

the platform. One of the key differentiators of MicroStrategy 8 is its integrated BI platform, eliminating the need for

companies to use numerous distinct technologies from different vendors for reporting, analysis, and performance

monitoring. MicroStrategy 8 provides a BI platform that companies can standardize on for all their BI needs.

With a scalable architecture and a single metadata, users can seamlessly navigate from scorecards and dashboards

to reports and analysis without being required to open and close multiple BI tools and navigate dissimilar interfaces.

MicroStrategy 8’s newly designed Web interface is specifically tailored for the business user. The user interface

includes an array of “one-click” actions with familiar paradigms to make business users more productive. For the first

time, users can format reports and scorecards in WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) mode and leverage the

formatting skills they already have to radically reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy new reports.

Why coMpAnieS chooSe MicroStrAtegy?

1. integrated architecture: The MicroStrategy product set is built from a single architectural foundation, delivering all

5 Styles of BI: Scorecards and Dashboards; Reporting; OLAP; Advanced Analysis; Alerts and Proactive Notification.

2. Full featured Web interface: MicroStrategy’s Web interface delivers a Windows-like feeling with drag-and-drop

interactivity from any Web browser. The advanced Web architecture is zero-footprint, using no Java or Active X

controls, and delivers a rich reporting experience both inside and outside the firewall.

3. Seamless integration of reporting, analysis, and monitoring: MicroStrategy can embed OLAP features

directly into enterprise reports like scorecards and dashboards, providing a seamless user experience that uncovers

root causes without the need for programming or switching interfaces.

4. ease-of-use and self-service: MicroStrategy’s unique WYSIWYG report design and editing allows MicroStrategy end

users to easily design and refine reports over the Web using familiar skills similar to Microsoft® PowerPoint or Excel.

5. high performance scaling to thousands of users: Unlike other BI providers, MicroStrategy software expands

with the application to efficiently scale from hundreds to thousands of people.

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6. proven data scalability: For the past six years, The OLAP Surveys have ranked MicroStrategy highest in data

scalability. With terabyte-size databases commonplace, MicroStrategy’s field-proven technology enables customers

to deploy more BI applications with greater analytic sophistication and user functionality.

7. Automated report maintainability: Dynamic metadata architecture ensures that changes ripple throughout all

reports automatically.

8. pervasive security and user administration: Security is automatically applied to all users, reports, and data

through role-based user administration.

9. engineered on a single code base: MicroStrategy is widely recognized for its meticulously engineered

software based on a single code base, scaling to organizations and applications of all sizes; leveraging any

hardware, operating system, and data source infrastructure while making BI more approachable for the average

business user.

IV. Comparison of MicroStrategy and Business Objects On Key BI Requirements

Business intelligence has the power to provide performance feedback and visibility to all people in an organization,

enabling businesses to make thousands of better decisions every day. However, not all BI technologies deliver on this

promise, falling short on a number of key requirements demanded of enterprise BI applications. The following table

outlines the 13 overarching and important criteria by which all modern BI technologies need to be assessed, and

provides a side-by-side evaluation of MicroStrategy 8 and Business Objects XI along these requirements.

KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

unified Bi Architecture

• Seamless integration of analytics and reporting for root cause analysis

• Single code base across platforms

• Single Web interface• Single metadata

yeS

MicroStrategy’s unified architecture provides a seamless integration of analytics and reporting from a single Web interface.

MicroStrategy is a single code base that is truly platform independent. A single shared metadata consisting of all reports and underlying reporting objects ensures one version of the truth. A unified Web interface means a common reporting and analysis paradigm for all users.

no

Business Objects (BO) is a loosely integrated set of tools, not a unified architecture.

Release 2 consists of multiple overlapping tools (with different interfaces and user paradigms); multiple different code bases, multiple separate metadatas and repositories. This multiplicity results in redundant setup and administration tasks.

BO’s portal, Infoview, is necessary to combine up to 10 different user interfaces together since BO reports and reporting objects do not fully integrate across their distinct tools, or from their desktop to Web interfaces.

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KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

Market proven enterprise Scalability and performance

• 64-bit business intelligence processing

• Minimal re-query of the database

• Multi-layer caching technology

• Customer references for large user and data scalability customer deployments

• Aggregate awareness• Multi-pass SQL• Distributed processing with

the relational database• Minimize network traffic

yeS

The MicroStrategy platform is designed for enterprise scalability. MicroStrategy’s ROLAP and multi-pass SQL approach leverages the latest innovations from database technology. It efficiently processes large volumes of transaction level data in the database, minimizing network traffic.

Data is automatically cached at multiple levels to reduce redundant computations and network traffic. The MicroStrategy SQL engine’s aggregate awareness can dynamically determine the most efficient table in every analysis. 64-bit processing allows MicroStrategy to support much greater numbers of users and data sizes while improving performance.

no

BO performance is constrained by its heavy dependence on the desktop processor and its inefficient SQL engines.

A high degree of workstation-based processing required in both BO and Crystal architectures means that most analysis is performed inefficiently on the workstation or Web server, and does not leverage the full power of the database. Unnecessarily high amounts of detail data is often extracted out of the database and replicated on the desktop or Web server for subsequent processing in the “BO microcube.”

BO’s basic SQL engine does not support true multi-pass SQL and many other performance enhancing features, such as automatic aggregate awareness and many database specific tuning optimizations. BO’s aggregate awareness is manual, requiring tedious hand-coding of the specific table access for each calculation on each report. BO cannot leverage the extra memory provided by 64-bit hardware.

reusable and rich Metadata layer

• Robust abstraction layer (where all physical constructs can be modeled logically and hidden from business user)

• Highly reusable metadata • Automatic change

management• Object oriented metadata

yeS

MicroStrategy’s object-oriented metadata defines an enterprise’s business layer in a single repository. The metadata objects can be nested as building blocks to create more complex objects. If a metadata object changes, every other metadata object dependent on it automatically changes. This ensures consistency across business defini-tions and minimizes the number of objects to maintain.

MicroStrategy assembles all metadata objects necessary for a report and dynami-cally builds the report SQL at run-time. It does not store a finished report as a static SQL statement.

liMiteD

BO’s multiple separate metadata models (Universes, Business Views and Metric Universes) vary in functionality supported and are stored in different repositories. Many calculations, conditions and prompts are typically created anew for each new report and cannot be easily used as building blocks to build other reporting objects.

Crystal stores many report objects e.g., some prompt values and formulas, directly in the re-port, and not in the Business View metadata model minimizing the ability to share report objects across users. With Desktop Intel-ligence much functionality is locally-stored in the report file, and not fully shared in the Uni-verse across users. These include user objects, formulas, local variables, and functions.

Local, or one-off, reporting objects in BO require much redundant setup and effort to maintain as changes occur to business rules, the database or other underlying reporting objects.

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KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

interactive WySiWyg Web interface

• Fully interactive reporting, completely zero-footprint over the Web from any browser

• WYSIWYG document design and editing over the Web

• Self-service • Easy-to-learn, familiar

windows on the Web paradigm

• WYSIWYG print capability

yeS

Business users create highly formatted reports leveraging any metadata object and using a zero-footprint WYSIWYG design paradigm that drastically shortens the report development time.

End users have a high degree of interactivity and are able to create, manipulate and format information through a single Web user interface. Changes are available right away without any need to “publish” or “export” information to other environments.

MicroStrategy does not rely on ActiveX. Report designers can use any browser.

MicroStrategy Web complements the on-screen display with identically formatted printed reports with features like page break logic and page setup options like “fit-to-page.”

liMiteD

User interactivity available via the Web interface is minimal and differs widely between the multiple BO product interfaces.

As Crystal development is mainly limited to the desktop the Crystal Explorer Web interface is primarily for static viewing of previously created desktop reports. For example, it is not possible to sort or filter a Crystal report from the Web while viewing it.

The WYSIWYG interactivity of Web Intelligence varies considerably by program download. HTML and ASP versions of the Web Intelligence interface are missing key functionality and include only limited filtering, sorting, pivoting, subtotaling and formatting.

The Java and ActiveX versions provide more functionality but require downloads and have browser dependencies. Report object changes are not available across the entire product set and require a “publish” and “export” process to fully make changes available to other users.

BO’s Web Intelligence has no built-in print capability.

industrial-Strength Multi-level Security

• 128-bit encryption - extranet ready

• Integrate with any security infrastructure with single sign-on

• Same report yields different views of the information based on user profiles

• Truly zero-footprint. No use or download of ActiveX and other plug-ins

• Cell level security

yeS

MicroStrategy provides centralized security administration across reporting, analysis and delivery. User profiles and privileges ensure users only access the appropriate information and functionality. Security filters provide the right access down to the cell level.

MicroStrategy supports 128-bit end-to-end encryption with a zero-footprint Web client making it a secure platform behind the firewall. MicroStrategy integrates with existing security authentication infrastructure such as LDAP, NT, and databases.

no

BO security has five fundamental weaknesses. It has security holes, it must be set up redundantly in multiple tools and interfaces, it requires excessive manual set up, it is not extranet-ready and does not fully leverage existing source system security. All these things make BO administration unnecessarily labor intensive.

Security holes include limited built-in microcube security, no automatic data level security, and limited 128-bit end-to-end encryption out-of-the-box.

Security is overlapping and must be set up separately for users of Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, and Dashboard Manager in various metadatas (i.e., Business Views and Universes) and multiple locations (i.e., Central Management Console, Designer and Business Views Manager tools).

Data level security requires manual hand coding of SQL WHERE clauses for each user group, for each table, and each level of data accessed.

Dynamic report personalization

• Comprehensive parameter and question prompting

• Security profiles personalize report content for individual users

• Report bursting

yeS

In MicroStrategy, a single report can automatically span hundreds of possible data combinations tailored to different user needs. Advanced report parameters, like object and hierarchy prompts, allow users to pick the business attributes and KPIs to include in the report.

A single report definition for IT to maintain can burst personalized information to hundreds of users.

liMiteD

Limited prompting and basic SQL engines constrain BO’s report personalization and typically leads to a high number of redundant and overlapping reports that are often created and maintained for each user.

Several key prompt types are limited in BO, including column prompts, hierarchical prompts, cascading prompts, and optional prompts. A separate report for each type of prompt is often required. Many of Crystal’s prompt values are typically hard coded into each report.

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KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

centralized enterprise Administration

• Self-tuning scalable server for maximum performance

• Usage monitoring / auditing• Controlled environment for

analysis • Version management /

migration• Single management console• Automated regression testing• Automated full impact analysis

yeS

MicroStrategy’s centralized administration provides a single console for real-time user and system management.

MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager provides hundreds of KPIs and corresponding dashboards to perform impact analysis, auditing and tuning of the BI application.

MicroStrategy Object Manager facilitates metadata life cycle management, metadata dependencies and project management.

MicroStrategy Integrity Manager automates the report comparison process and verifiesthe consistency of reports. This tool can detect, compare, and present inconsistencies in reports and data caused by changes in the BI ecosystem. Integrity Manager alerts the system administrator of changes in a report. It also automatically highlights the differences in the numeric values, SQL, or display.

liMiteD

BO administration is distributed across multiple tools and is missing critical functionality necessary to proactively monitor and tune Web-based deployments.

Users and processes are administered through multiple tools. BO security is configured in 3 different places: Central Management Console, Designer and Crystal Business View Manager. Separate servers for each product mean multiple points of server administration.

BO’s functionality for monitoring usage, auditing, managing metadata, life cycle and change management and performing impact analysis are limited and vary by product, providing no easy way to administer a multi-product BO environment.

Seamless Microsoft office integration

• All Office products supported (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook)

• Leverage all BI reports and reporting objects

• Full new report creation• Persistent and

interchangeable formatting across Office and Web

yeS

MicroStrategy delivers the complete reporting and analysis environment to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook users. MicroStrategy Office applications are linked to MicroStrategy security and administration, ensuring 100% data consistency across the enterprise.

Users are able to access existing reports or create new ones. Changes are immediately reflected interchangeably across MicroStrategy Office and Web interfaces. Microsoft Office formatting changes are preserved after automatic data updates.

MicroStrategy Office allows users to access report information containing more than 64,000 rows in Microsoft Excel.

liMiteD

BO’s Office integration is missing key functionality and provides only limited access to the BO analysis environment.

BO’s Live Office cannot fully access OLAP data sources. In addition, Live Office does not support new report creation capability via full prompting and parameterized reporting.

Formatting changes made within Microsoft Office do not fully persist the next time the user runs that same report. Formatting changes made in Office are typically lost when a user refreshes data.

Flexible and powerful olAp Analysis

• Integrated predictive analytics and forecasting with best-of-breed data mining tools

• Collaborative processing (between analytical engine and RDBMS-based processing)

• Built-in financial and statistical functions

• Business question complexity supported by multi-pass SQL capability

• Drill anywhere fosters investigative analysis

• Set analysis

yeS

The MicroStrategy SQL Engine’s ability to dynamically generate multi-pass SQL allows users to ask complex business questions such as market basket and set analysis e.g., view sales for the current year for all customers who purchased product ‘x’ last year. Users can drill anywhere for a boundary-free speed-of-thought investigative analysis.

MicroStrategy’s Data Mining Services leverages definitions from all major third-party data mining vendors, providing predictive analytics to thousands of users.

MicroStrategy’s Analytical Engine provides hundreds of built-in financial, statistical, and mathematical functions. The SQL Engine and the Analytical Engine work collaboratively to ensure that processing is performed efficiently on the optimal tier.

no

BO provides only limited support for ad-vanced analysis. BO’s latest release still has a single-pass SQL engine similar to what it had over 10 years ago.

A single-pass SQL engine which does not leverage database processing features means no dynamic or multi-level analysis as is required for contribution or semi-additive analysis.

Many key SQL constructs are supported sporadically across the tools, and some are not supported at all, including no direct sup-port for split fact table analysis, subqueries and set operators, and no full leveraging of database functions.

Some analysis capability is provided in BO’s Performance Management modules but is not available in Crystal Reports, so BO’s analy-sis cannot be used in formatted reporting.

Drilling is limited to static predefined report linking.

There is limited integration with 3rd party data mining products.

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KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

Dynamic enterprise Dashboards and Advanced visualization Widgets

• Dashboards integrated with industrial-strength BI platform

• Full power of ROLAP analysis• Single design environment• Infinitely extensible

visualization• Advanced visualization Flash

libraries• Native parallel Flash and

DHTML visualizations• On-dashboard interactivity • WYSIWYG design paradigm

yeS

MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards fully leverage the MicroStrategy 8 platform. Dashboards are created using reports and objects from MicroStrategy’s single metadata. Intelligence Server provides its sophisticated processing, security, caching and analytical capabilities.

Users design dashboards from MicroStrategy’s single Web interface using the already familiar design paradigm. Dashboards are created in a zero-footprint Web interface, pixel perfect and freeform layout.

Dashboard designers create highly interactive dashboards and can render them in DHTML, Flash, PDF or Microsoft Office products.

liMiteD

BO offers two different dashboard solutions, Crystal Xcelsius and Dashboard Manager, each a standalone product.

Xcelsius has limited ability to reuse reports and objects created in Crystal or Web Intelligence, leading to multiple versions of the truth.

Xcelsius does not fully take advantage of relational data storage, instead relying on Microsoft Excel as a data storage or data access mechanism. As a result, Xcelsius is limited in its ability to perform analysis on large amounts of data.

Analysis on metrics in Dashboard Manager is limited to a single dimension and time.

Xcelsius renders visualizations only in Flash, and does not have the option to render visualizations in thin-client DHTML. Dashboard Manager cannot render visualizations in Flash, limiting its level of dashboard interactivity.

heterogeneous Data Source Access from a Single Web Document

• Direct access to SAP® BW, Hyperion Essbase and Microsoft Analysis Services

• Operational database reporting with freeform SQL

yeS

MicroStrategy allows a single document to present data pulled directly from multiple data sources.

MicroStrategy’s Operational SQL Engine can generate reports from data residing in any operational database across the organization. MicroStrategy can directly query SAP BW InfoCubes and QueryCubes.

no

Dynamic access and presentation of data from multiple dimensional data models is not available in Crystal.

Different BO products are needed to access different kinds of data. Web Intelligence is required for ad-hoc query against relational data access. Voyager is used for accessing OLAP sources. In BO XI Release 2, Desktop Intelligence can only access relational sources despite previously being able to access OLAP data sources.

robust enterprise reporting

• Support for wide range of report styles

• Pixel-level absolute positioning

• In-place analysis• Desktop publishing

formatting• High quality printing• Export to Excel

yeS

MicroStrategy’s Web Interface is designed to maximize business user and report designer productivity. Highly formatted documents are built using common desktop publishing paradigms such as rulers and pixel-level positioning, all over a zero-footprint Web.

MicroStrategy offers comprehensive report styles from banded reports to dashboards and scorecards. These documents are highly interactive providing in-place analysis, pivoting, drilling and Excel-like formatting toolbars.

liMiteD

Reporting functionality varies widely by tool. Analysis and ad-hoc query cannot be incorporated in formatted reports.

Formatted reporting is available in some products and not in others. Web Intel-ligence provides only limited formatting. Formatted dashboards are created in the stand-alone Dashboard Manager or Xcelsius products.

Despite being a report writing tool, Crystal Reports has limitations such as not being able to do: absolute positioning, freeze pane, format templates, and hide columns. Report consumers are unable to edit the report layout while viewing the live report, therefore there is no support for a real-time WYSIWYG view of changes.

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KEY BI REQUIREMENT MICROSTRATEGY 8 BUSINESS OBJECTS XI RELEASE 2

information Delivery

• Wide range of output types: Web, print, fax, wireless

• Alerting and Thresholds• Dashboards and Scorecards• Portals integration• Fully interactive reports and

dashboards accessed from mobile devices

yeS

Users get personalized alerts triggered by dynamic events and time scheduled reports, via portal, print, e-mail, wireless or file servers.

The MicroStrategy platform leverages highly scalable technology that slices a single report and dynamically distributes personalized information to the right users. Reusing a single report across hundreds of users saves processing resources.

Users can easily assemble scorecards and dashboards based on existing objects and integrating several data sources, without the need of an extra application or interface.

MicroStrategy Mobile allows users to run reports and dashboards directly on their BlackBerry® smartphones. Reports are cached directly on the BlackBerry for fast, offline viewing. Reports are fully interactive; data can be sliced and sorted; columns can be locked and resized for effective comparisons of metrics. MicroStrategy Mobile accesses the same reports and dashboards used by all other MicroStrategy user interfaces, ensuring a single version of the truth. MicroStrategy Mobile actively governs memory and bandwidth usage to ensure harmonious operations with other critical BlackBerry applications.

liMiteD

BO’s information delivery capabilities varies widely by tool. Publishing Profiles used to personalize report content by recipient can only be applied to Desktop Intelligence publications. There are limitations to e-mail bursting and personalization with Crystal.

Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports have limited support capabilities for efficient high volume reporting. For example, neither support single-pass report bursting thereby forcing a separate DB query for each recipient of the same basic report. BO Pub-lications lack true dynamic distribution list capabilities. Therefore, Administrators often have to manually define and maintain static distribution lists since they cannot fully use conditions to create dynamic recipient lists.

Business Objects Mobile Interactive Viewing allows users to run reports from mobile devices. However, users must typically log in directly to a BO server to access reports, limiting users’ ability to access reports offline or in network dead-zones. Report interactivity on the mobile device is limited, with no ability to re-order columns, sort columns, or quickly view report slices via page-by attributes.

V. Critical Questions to Ask When Evaluating MicroStrategy

and Business Objects

There is a fundamental difference between the software architectures of Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Despite

the introduction of some new tangential BI functionality in Nov. 2005, Release 2 is still primarily the same Business

Objects legacy of multiple tools with disparate architectures. BO’s development efforts on the backend still have not

addressed some of BO’s fundamental architectural shortcomings. Web user scalability is still constrained and adminis-

tration is not centralized. Much core functionality is still restricted by its desktop legacy of local microcube, file-based

processing, and a basic SQL engine. Business Objects’ R&D has had to focus on product line integration at the expense

of product innovation. Growing through acquisition has left Business Objects with a loosely integrated set of tools with

multiple overlapping metadata layers. Business Objects is still some number of years away from a full unified product

offering which is truly re-architected for the Web.

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By contrast, MicroStrategy’s code base was completely rewritten over the course of five years as a unified server-centric

architecture. MicroStrategy has been building its platform organically and keeping the utmost integrity and efficiency.

This basic difference allows MicroStrategy customers to benefit from:

• A greater range of functionality through a single Web interface and unified architecture which decreases training

and maintenance costs.

• A productive WYSIWYG editing environment which can be used across any Web browser.

• Market proven user and data scalability with more efficient use of network and server resources.

• Greater analytical breadth, including predictive analytics.

• A market-tested and bullet-proof security infrastructure.

• Lower total cost of ownership by lowering IS support and maintenance requirements.

The following questions elicit these basic MicroStrategy strengths with some very specific comparisons that should be

made when evaluating Business Objects and MicroStrategy.

1. MicroStrategy provides all the major styles of Bi – Scorecards and Dashboards, enterprise reporting,

olAp analysis, predictive Analysis and Alerts and notification from a single unified Web interface.

Why does Business objects require two desktop products to create, and as many as four Web-based

products to deploy, a limited subset of this same Bi functionality?

MicroStrategy supports analysis and reporting functionality, from dashboard creation with OLAP analysis to WYSIWYG

creation of formatted reports from a single Web interface. MicroStrategy Web allows business users to move seam-

lessly between all necessary styles of BI and combine multiple styles within a single report display.

Business Objects XI Release 2 requires a separate product and interface for each style of BI, making transition from one

style to another very cumbersome for the user and developer who has to encode and maintain the transitions. Despite

Business Objects marketing claims of an integrated architecture, Business Objects still requires a separate Crystal Reports

desktop environment for formatted reporting and a separate, somewhat overlapping, Business Objects Desktop Intel-

ligence environment for ad-hoc query and light analysis with very little functional integration between the two. From

the Web, a minimum of four Web interfaces are typically required; true formatted reporting is only available to Crystal

Reports Explorer users; ad-hoc query of relational sources requires Web Intelligence; but for OLAP source analysis, the

Voyager product is used; finally, true dashboard creation and usage requires Dashboard Manager or Xcelsius. Functional

integration between them is limited to manually coded static report linking from one interface to another. Another symp-

tom of BO’s non-integrated architecture is that core BI functionality varies widely between the products.

This Business Objects tool fragmentation negatively impacts both end users and IT administrators. End users need to

learn and use multiple interfaces and reporting paradigms. For example, reporting centers around “Business Elements”

and a “Data Foundation” in Crystal Reports and is a completely different paradigm in Desktop Intelligence which uses

“classes,” “objects” and “dimensions.” End users need to know which tool other users have in order to export, publish

and share documents properly. The negative impact on IT administrators is even greater. IT administrators must create

and support reporting environments for multiple tools each with their own corresponding servers, including manually

migrating and reconciling the metadata of the various tools.

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2. MicroStrategy’s 64-bit native platform takes advantage of customers’ investments in the latest 64-bit

hardware and operating systems from Windows to uniX. can Business objects Xi release 2 leverage 64-

bit hardware and operating systems?

The MicroStrategy 64-bit platform is compiled natively to leverage the memory address space benefits from 64-bit

operating systems and microprocessors.

Business Objects XI Release 2 is compiled in 32-bit native mode even if it is running on 64-bit operating systems which

results in Business Objects not being able to leverage the benefits of 64-bit environments and customers’ 64-bit hard-

ware investments.

MicroStrategy has a more modular code base which allows just a portion of its ‘kernel’ to be compiled for the appropriate

OS-chipset combination. This allows MicroStrategy to perform very little work to support a broad range of platforms.

An inherited benefit of MicroStrategy’s unified code base is that every enhancement done in the code is common for

all the platforms supported. Therefore, “software bugs” are less prone to be introduced.

Business Objects XI Release 2 is made of a mix of C++ and Java code taken from different products requiring major

changes in order to support new environments or enhancements (e.g., 64-bit environments); the reason that Business

Objects’ UNIX versions typically lags the Windows versions.

3. MicroStrategy’s unified architecture and centralized administration minimizes the effort in developing,

broadly deploying and maintaining multiple applications across multiple platforms. Why is Business

objects so maintenance intensive and hard to deploy broadly?

MicroStrategy’s ROLAP engine dynamically generates optimized SQL for any type of analysis, minimizing the need

for any manual workarounds or custom SQL. MicroStrategy is fully automatically aggregate aware, meaning that the

MicroStrategy Engine automatically selects, every time, the most efficient table for data retrieval.

MicroStrategy provides comprehensive centralized administration through MicroStrategy Administrator, which auto-

mates the development, deployment and maintenance of multiple applications across multiple platforms. A remote

administration console enables complete control over system monitoring of all tasks and administration of users and

objects. The Object Manager component facilitates complete life-cycle application management. Reporting objects can

be migrated easily across development, test and production environments and can be shared between users, groups,

and projects.

Business Objects is maintenance intensive and challenging to deploy primarily due to its basic SQL engine which

requires a high degree of local custom processing and manual workarounds for key functionality such as aggregate

awareness and the implementation of data security. Heavy local processing, such as is required for Business Objects’

user objects, formulas, local variables and functions, means reports are not sharable across users and must be recreated

for each user. Multiple products have their own repositories meaning redundant metadata setup and manual “export”

and “publish” processes before reports can even be statically viewed by other users.

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Business Objects provides a very weak object oriented definition of the data and has only a basic SQL engine

which prevents BO tools from supporting automatic aggregate processing. The workaround is for a Business Objects

Administrator to manually point each calculation for each report and each user to the most efficient table. The steps

are tedious and risky because double counting is possible if “incompatible” tables, or tables not at the appropriate

calculation level, are not fully defined.

The following five steps must be performed each time a new calculation or aggregate table is added:

1. Define aggregate table(s).

2. Manually join each aggregate table to all related tables.

3. Define all possible table(s) where a calculation could be made.

4. Within each measure, list tables in order of descending size (so the

Business Objects SQL Engine knows which table to access).

5. Define all possible incompatibilities relative to all other reporting objects.

The high degree of manual setup and maintenance limits the performance, maintainability and scalability of Business

Objects deployments.

In addition, multiple metadatas and limited support for centralized administration hinders Business Objects’ deployability.

4. MicroStrategy fully supports sophisticated “n” order analysis. Why is Business objects only suitable for

simple first order questions?

MicroStrategy provides a number of optimized features necessary to provide comprehensive sophisticated analysis at

the desired level of detail which include:

• Collaboration between MicroStrategy’s optimized SQL engine and mid-tier analytical engine in an iterative

fashion to enable “n” order calculations.

• Analytical library consisting of over 200 built-in statistical, financial and OLAP functions. In addition,

end users may define their own analytical functions and embed them into the platform.

• Integrated Set Analysis or the filtering of an attribute based on its relationship with another attribute.

In supporting this, MicroStrategy is implicitly using the result set of one analysis as a filter for a second

analysis all completely transparent to the end user.

• User-defined custom groups or dynamic virtual attributes which support multiple levels of analysis on

one report.

• Nested aggregation capability to transparently support calculations at varying dynamic levels of analysis.

• 3rd party out-of-the-box integration with best-of-breed data mining systems like SPSS, SAS and IBM

Dataminer for predictive analysis

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In MicroStrategy, all analytical sophistication either occurs seamlessly, as in the case of iterative processing and nested

aggregation, or is user defined such as with custom group definitions. No administrative support is required. In addi-

tion, the use of all of these features is fully available to Web users; any Web user with full report creation privileges can

leverage the full range of analytical sophistication.

Business Objects does not fully support the important analytical features, discussed above, across the entire product

line without customizations due to the limitations of microcube architecture and the inherent challenges of integrating

cube-based processing with database access. Business Objects offers very limited analytical functions which can be

shared across users. Crystal Reports does not fully expose RDBMS-specific analytic functions. Analysis on Metrics in

Business Objects’ Dashboard Manager is limited to a single dimension and time.

Most importantly, the Business Objects approach typically requires advanced analysis to be set up by an administrator

as a pre-defined measure via Business Objects’ Designer product. Web end users can only use existing simple measures

and apply sum, avg, min, max, count, and percentages to existing calculated values. This restricts valuable analytical

flexibility from end-users and also means that new analytical requirements typically require administrators to rebuild

universes. Given this, the sweet spot for Business Objects is simple ad-hoc query and report writing for departmen-

tal needs, where a small number of users need basic report access to summary data. Users are not able to analyze

transactional level or customer-centric data in any truly meaningful way since all data must be returned to the desktop

or Web server for processing.

Business Objects microcubes answer simple first order questions, but any further analysis requires costly non-optimized

database access. End user reporting queries will change significantly and grow as users start to explore data. Due to

local memory and disk capacity constraints which limit microcube size, users typically spend approximately 40-60%

of their time accessing the database outside of the local microcubes. The only workarounds are for users to try to

pre-select as much as possible from the universe (not without significant cost given microcube build times) or schedule

everything for batch execution. Any type of meaningful ad-hoc analysis will result in microcube explosion and multiple

trips across the network to the database. No support for multi-pass SQL means limited multi-level analytics.

Business Objects cannot answer many important business questions. Most necessary sophisticated analytics are not sup-

ported across the entire product line. Limited and manually intensive metric dimensionality means percent-to-total analysis

is impaired. Limited non-aggregatable metrics means that inventory or account balance analysis is very impaired. Limited

prompted conditional metric support means BO users are unable to prompt for sophisticated calculations which is needed

to allow the user to pick the start and end date at run time. BO’s inability to provide ranking-within-ranking means it is not

possible for BO products to transparently support important queries such as “show me my top 5 products for my top 5

customers.” Many other analytical requirements are only supported in some BO tools or through manual SQL coding.

5. MicroStrategy has a single unified highly reusable metadata layer. When will Business objects have a

single unified metadata that is reusable and fully shared by users?

MicroStrategy reporting objects are all object-oriented. Report objects can be used as building blocks for other objects,

so the same report component can be used by multiple reports, reducing redundant work. Since MicroStrategy reports

are objects, they automatically inherit changes to related objects without any additional developer effort. For example,

if a metric’s formula changes, all reports that use that metric will seamlessly inherit the new formula. MicroStrategy’s

object-oriented metadata lowers development time by reducing redundant work, and reduces maintenance work by

minimizing the number of objects that need to be maintained.

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Business Objects has multiple independent metadata; Business Objects Universes, Crystal Business Views, and Perfor-

mance Manager Metric Universes; none of which provide the layers of abstraction MicroStrategy’s metadata does.

Further complicating matters, the file formats between Web Intelligence documents (.WID) and Desktop Intelligence

documents (.REP) are different, making it hard to seamlessly move desktop reports to Web-based reports without

recreating various underlying reporting objects and undertaking manual Web publishing steps.

The lack of metadata integration means limited functionality with duplicate separate storage, and manual synchroniza-

tion, ultimately resulting in “multiple versions of the truth.” Most underlying reporting objects, including conditions

and calculations, formulas, variables, and user defined objects are not fully reusable across Business Objects tools.

The lack of an object orientation means multiple report versions are typically maintained and significant limitations in

metadata management exist. Business Objects does not support impact analysis and change management across the

entire product line. Proactively detecting which specific reports and reporting objects are impacted by either a change

to the physical database or a change to the ‘profit’ measure is limited and varies widely by product.

While Business Objects marketing claims they are moving towards a unified metadata and that three separate meta-

data versions are not limiting, an organization will have to determine if all the following top 10 challenges created by

multiple metadata are acceptable:

1. Metadata is populated by multiple different products: Designer, Crystal Business Views Manager, Dashboard

Manager, etc.

2. Metadata is stored in different physical repositories, requiring copying and metadata duplication across repositories

• Universes are stored in the Enterprise repository.

• Metric Universes are stored in the Performance Management repository.

3. All Metadata is not fully available from all products:

• Crystal Business Views can only be used by Crystal Reports, not by any of the other Business Objects products.

• Business Objects Live Office – Excel cannot access Business Objects Universes or Desktop Intelligence documents.

• Metric Universes are not available to Crystal users.

4. Not all functionality is available from all BO metadatas:

• Significant functionality (e.g., multiple SQL SELECT statements, embedding of objects that contain HTML

links, etc.) from Business Objects’ Universe metadata is not available to the Crystal environment.

5. Varying degrees of functionality; some functionality available in one metadata is not available in other metadata

• Crystal Business Views do not support functionality such as basic aggregation calculations, ability to handle

multiple STAR schemas, etc.

6. A manual process of some type (depending on the desired synchronization) is required to port metadatas.

While Business Objects offers various Import and Migration Wizards to assist with some of the required port-

ing, Universes that contain measures must be manually copied to the Performance Management repository.

7. Business Objects Web tools (e.g., Web Intelligence) cannot fully leverage key Desktop Intelligence reporting

objects, including Business Objects Formulas.

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8. Metadata repositories have varying physical structures resulting in separate maintenance, including back-up

and recover processes.

• BO Enterprise Universes are file-based.

• Performance Management Metric Universes are table-based.

9. Metadata implementation differences exist

• A much higher degree of intelligence is built locally (i.e., on a by report by user basis) into Crystal Reports

vs. Business Objects Universes.

• Security is embedded in different metadata layers (i.e., Universes, Business Views) to varying degrees.

10. Migration of multiple metadatas from one product version or architecture to another is essentially a manual

process requiring significant testing and recreation of reports and underlying reporting objects.

6. MicroStrategy allows users to run any type of report from within excel, Word and powerpoint. Does

Business objects’ live office support the access of all pre-defined Business objects enterprise reports

or the creation of any new report?

MicroStrategy Office provides full MicroStrategy reporting, analysis and monitoring to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and

Word users. Users are able to access any existing MicroStrategy report, or create new reports completely from scratch,

from within any Microsoft Office product.

Business Objects’ Live Office is missing key functionality and provides limited access to the Business Objects environment.

Live Office cannot fully access Business Objects Universes. For example, Excel cannot fully access OLAP data sources. In

addition, key functionality is missing including limited new report creation capability via full prompting and parameter-

ized reporting. Formatting changes made within Microsoft Office do not fully persist as changes made are typically lost

when a user refreshes data.

7. MicroStrategy can perform full analysis across the breadth of transaction-level data. the amount of

data that MicroStrategy can support is limited only by the amount of data the rDBMS can support.

Why is Business objects so limited in the amount of data it can analyze?

MicroStrategy’s third generation ROLAP architecture fundamentally scales to terabytes of data by performing analysis on

the optimal server-based platform; in the database or on MicroStrategy’s Intelligence Server in an iterative fashion. By

definition, database technology scales and is the optimal location to perform high volume data processing assuming the

underlying BI platform generates highly optimized platform-specific SQL as is the case with MicroStrategy 8. MicroStrategy’s

Intelligence Server is the optimal location to perform multidimensional analysis, such as applying various OLAP functions

or performing cube-like slice and dice, fully off loading analysis not handled efficiently by a database.

Business Objects’ desktop-based processing and microcube architecture are inherently limited because building

large-sized result-set microcubes is a network bottleneck, involves extensive manual maintenance and requires very

significant hard disk capacity on the workstation. By definition, microcube sizes are fundamentally constrained by the

amount of data which can be replicated across the network, stored in desktop memory and processed on the desktop

computer. While large data volumes can be accessed, they cannot be fully analyzed.

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Data scalability negatively impacts Web users who access desktop reports and must download not only the report results

but all underlying data contained in the corresponding microcube to their desktops. In addition, even Web Intelli-

gence-based microcubes, which reside on the Web server box, must be replicated across the network and individually

loaded into Web server memory, along with their corresponding project universe definition, limiting the number of

cubes which can be analyzed concurrently.

Additional architectural limitations hindering Business Objects data scalability include:

• High number of uncontrolled direct connections from the desktop and the Web to the database eventually

crashing the database

• Use of generic non-optimized single-pass SQL bogging down the database

• Limited aggregate capability resulting in a high amount of data aggregating on the fly

• Limited shared caching, across the entire product set, means high number of queries running live against the

database

• Limited application server functionality

• Most data processing performed locally, which over-utilizes the desktop and grossly under-leverages the data-

base. Business Objects performs most processing on the client desktop and the Web server box with minimal

leveraging of the power of the database (e.g., particularly that processing, such as transaction-level analysis,

which is far more efficiently performed closer to the data source by the database).

8. MicroStrategy is a pure-Web architecture built from the ground up – for the internet – and provides

the Web reporting, security, performance and Web standards necessary for scalable Web deployment.

Why is Business objects not suitable for a broad Web-based deployment of business intelligence?

Business Objects’ lack of a pure-Web architecture severely limits Web user scalability by placing heavy loads on the

network and the Web server box. Limited true Web application server functionality and an architecture which requires

the execution of costly client/server programs on the Business Objects Web Intelligence box means extensive memory

requirements per concurrent Web user, significantly limiting Web user scalability.

Equally problematic, Business Objects requires varying amounts of client-side downloads depending on the Web

requirements and the type of Business Objects report accessed. High reliance on a heavy client plug-in for Web users

to view or modify a Business Objects desktop Document or create a Web Intelligence report means Business Objects

is limited in its ability to support Web-based enterprise BI. Any type of access – even simple view only access – of a

desktop report by a Web user requires some degree of program download to the Web browser machine. Without this

client plug-in, Web users will have limited access to Business Objects desktop reports and will have only very limited

report creation and editing capability, access to only very simple calculation types such as sum, count, min, max, and

percent only, and limited drill capabilities. In short, BI architectures that bolt-on Web front ends to legacy client/server

systems cannot scale to the necessary number of concurrent Web users.

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9. MicroStrategy provides high performance data analysis. Why is Business objects performance lacking?

MicroStrategy 8 provides the data scalability of a ROLAP architecture with the response times of a cube approach.

MicroStrategy 8 achieves this by dynamically optimizing performance at all levels and proactively preventing bottle-

necks from occurring at any point in the BI environment. MicroStrategy supports aggregate tables which optimize the

performance of the OLAP and Reporting application. MicroStrategy’s engine is “aggregate aware,” ensuring processing

against the most efficient tables.

While analysis within a pre-built Business Objects microcube can be reasonably fast, there are two other points where

data processing occurs; the initial loading of the microcube, and whenever analysis extends beyond the microcube

(which it often does) and all raw data must be re-retrieved and the microcube is completely reloaded. Initial microcube

loading will often require more time to build than a comparable MicroStrategy 8 query due to the non-optimized SQL

generated, the extensive raw data which must be retrieved and the inefficiency of performing data processing on the

desktop or Web server.

Business Objects’ manual aggregate awareness means there is no guarantee that the most efficient table is accessed.

With 64-bit processing, MicroStrategy can support much greater numbers of users and data sizes while improving

performance. BO cannot leverage the extra memory provided by 64-bit hardware.

10. MicroStrategy provides industrial-strength multi-level security. Does Business objects support data level

security and what other security limitations exist with Business objects?

MicroStrategy 8 security contains the necessary depth and breadth to allow the secured deployment of BI applications

to employees, partners, suppliers and customers through the Internet. MicroStrategy accomplishes this via the use

of privileges at the application functionality level; access control lists at the reporting object level; and security filters,

connection mapping, and support for database views at the data level. In addition, user level security is supported via

MicroStrategy’s integration with NT and LDAP while transmission level security is supported via 128-bit SSL transmis-

sion, 128-bit data encryption or double firewall configuration with no database connection on the Web server.

MicroStrategy 8’s profile-based security ensures that every part of the platform and delivery architecture is secure and

can be centrally administered. In addition, MicroStrategy’s implementation of industry-standard security measures

ensures MicroStrategy’s security model can be integrated into any existing security approach. MicroStrategy security is

fully granular to the “cell level” meaning all reporting objects and underlying data cells can be controlled at the neces-

sary level via a right mouse click.

Despite being radically revamped in Business Objects XI Release 2, Business Objects still lacks industrial-strength security.

Business Objects is still not only missing key security components, but their security architecture has serious security

flaws which jeopardize corporate assets. These flaws include limited built-in microcube security. Business Objects has

a number of fundamental security risks (e.g., heavy use of Active X and Java applets) and security weaknesses (e.g.,

limited support for existing source system security, and data level security can be bypassed).

Business Objects security is maintenance intensive because security is typically set up and maintained in multiple tools

and interfaces: Business Objects’ Central Management Console and Designer tools and in Crystal’s Business Views

Manager tools. Business Objects’ data-level security is manually implemented with hard-coded SQL WHERE clauses,

creating significant risk. These hard-coded SQL WHERE clause qualifications are manually written in Universes and Busi-

ness Views for each user against each table at each level of data analysis to fully restrict data level access. This is very

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administrator intensive and if the necessary WHERE clause is left off even one table in the reporting environment for

a given user, unauthorized access is possible. For Web Intelligence users, microcubes, containing potentially sensitive

data, are stored on the Web server.

VI. Top 10 Points to Consider When Migrating from the Business

Objects Version � and � to XI

Business Objects’ customers currently using versions 5 and 6 will face numerous challenges when they migrate to the XI

product line. It is important for current Business Objects’ customers and prospects to understand the level of effort and

risk given the negative impact and distraction these extensive migration efforts will have throughout the entire Business

Objects organization.

Surveys, such as The OLAP Survey 6, show that a software vendor distracted with the development, migration and

support of multiple divergent product lines is far less likely to deliver new and stable product functionality on time

and will most likely provide sub-standard quality support. Given this, Business Objects’ customers and prospects must

consider the following ten migration points:

1. tedious effort

All Business Objects and Crystal functionality, including Report, and underlying Universe and Business View metadata

objects, requires conversion to XI on an object-by-object basis in a rigorous sequence. Administrators must follow

a complex road map specifying the various report conversion, migration utilities, import wizards and manual

customization to apply to each object. When the process is not followed and an object is missed or not migrated in

the proper sequence the report breaks.

2. Manual effort

Given the radically different repository file structures and security model in the XI architecture, heavy manual conversion

effort is required. Business Objects’ migration and conversion utilities “automate” a minimal percentage of the effort

and require a high degree of manual processing; the number of steps varies by product version and functionality type.

3. extensive rework

In addition to the manual steps on the basic functionality conversion, a high percentage of the Business Objects’

reporting environment must be completely recreated in XI including:

• All 5.X reports and metadata objects

• All locally defined report logic (e.g., user objects, functions, formulas, user defined variables, etc.)

• All customizations (via SDK, any hand-coded SQL, etc.)

• All Broadcast Agent type functionality (e.g., publications, schedules, distribution lists)

• All user and user group definitions

• All security setup (Note: The XI security model is radically different)

• All Business Query analysis

• Most Corporate Document functionality

• Most Universes with any degree of complexity (e.g., linked universes)

• Most complex Web Intelligence reports (e.g., OLAP source-based )

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4. not for the risk Averse

Given XI is wholly unproven and untested in production environments, it is the risk, complexity and XI stability issues

which potentially pose the biggest challenges in converting to XI. Erroneous results and corrupted reports result if multi-

step manual processes are not followed in precise order.

5. comprehensive testing is required

Given the complexity and risk, Business Objects recommends side-by-side parallel running of the 5.X and 6.X along

with XI for an extensive period. Testing is cumbersome given the amount of manual object rebuilding and includes user,

system, load/stress and performance testing. The effort is compounded given the many differences between the 5.X/6.

X architectures and the XI architectures including varying structures, models, calculation engines, user paradigms and

server processes.

6. Migrations are time intensive

The conversion processing is time and resource intensive, given that migration occurs one object at a time. While

Business Objects offers numerous performance tips, including suggesting that organizations minimize the number of

reports they convert, the strain on the network and database is significant resulting in the need for a fully dedicated

server and processing environment.

7. Migrating is not cheap

Organizations will need to pay Business Objects an XI migration tax, yet for no additional capacity and minimal

product functionality. Customers must either have separate licensed copies of infrastructure to run both Business

Objects and Crystal content or they must upgrade at a significant cost from Business Objects Enterprise Professional to

Enterprise Premium. The biggest cost may be the opportunity cost organizations incur as they must forgo new report

development and enhancements while the migration is under way.

8. Building Migration utilities have Distracted Business objects’ r&D

Creating multiple migration wizard and conversion utilities has distracted Business Objects’ R&D efforts. Every major

release since the Crystal acquisition has either been late or lacking in relevant new BI functionality.

9. Supporting Migration efforts have Distracted Business objects’ technical and Field Support

Supporting multiple migration and conversion processes has distracted Business Objects’ support efforts, resulting

in diminished support quality for all customers. The OLAP Surveys have found that for four years in a row, Business

Objects’ customers have been among the least satisfied with the quality of their technical support.

10. Minimal upside

Business Objects XI does not include a sufficient amount of new end user functionality or back-end architecture to

justify the migration costs. The only reason to migrate is that Business Objects will soon be dropping support for versions

5 and 6. Most end user functionality has not been enhanced e.g., Business Objects XI Desktop Intelligence offers very

little additional functionality over Business Objects Desktop version 6 and some key functionality is missing in XI e.g., the

ability to publish Web reports or use stored procedures in Universes.

MicroStrategy Incorporated • 1861 International Drive McLean, VA 22102 • 703.848.8600 • www.microstrategy.com COLL-0673 1007