SAP and Business Objects Positioned in Leaders Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

SAN JOSE, Calif. and PARIS - SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Business Objects, an SAP company, today announced they have been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” report.1 This report was based on an evaluation of Business Objects and SAP’s completeness of vision and ability to execute.

According to Gartner, “leaders in the data integration tools market will be front runners in the convergence of single purpose tools into an offering that supports a range of data delivery styles. The leading vendors will be strong in the more traditional data integration patterns such as extract, transform and load (ETL), they will support newer patterns such as data federation, and will provide capabilities that enable data services in the context of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Leaders have significant mind share in the market, and resources skilled with their tools are readily available. These vendors establish market trends, to a large degree, by providing new functional capabilities in their products, and by identifying new types of business problems where data integration tools can bring significant value. Examples of deployments that span multiple projects and types of use cases are commonplace in their customer base.”

Business Objects’ data integration products are part of a comprehensive information management offering, which provides customers with a foundation of trusted information for any data-driven business or strategic IT initiatives, such as data migration, enterprise resource planning or business intelligence. Together, SAP and Business Objects empower customers with an unmatched set of solutions that deliver decision-quality, unified and well understood information across the enterprise. Customers benefit from this best-of-breed portfolio that supports diverse, heterogeneous environments, complete with capabilities for data integration, data quality, master data management and metadata management.

Business Objects also continues to demonstrate its market leadership with the release of BusinessObjects™ Data Services software, the industry’s first product to combine enterprise-class data integration and data quality.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted September 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” by Ted Friedman, Mark A. Beyer, Andreas Bitterer. Sept. 22, 2008.