Business Objects
More info
- Creator
- Bernard Liautaud, Denis Payre
- Released
- 1990–2008
- Owner
- SAP (from 2008)
- Type
- Business intelligence
French BI company that let finance departments query databases without writing SQL — and which SAP bought rather than build the same thing itself.
Bernard Liautaud and Denis Payre founded it in France in 1990. The central idea was the "universe": a semantic layer where a technician mapped tables and joins once and for all onto business terms like "customer" and "revenue". Users dragged those terms around, and the tool quietly generated SQL against the data warehouse underneath.
In 2003 it bought Crystal Decisions, and with it Crystal Reports, which plenty of developers knew better than the parent. Then in 2007 the whole BI market consolidated within months: Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP bought Business Objects for €4.8 billion, and IBM bought Cognos. The product lives on as SAP BusinessObjects, now spelled as one word.