{"id":11875,"date":"2007-04-23T09:46:38","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T08:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.220.58.236\/blog\/?p=28"},"modified":"2007-04-23T09:46:38","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T08:46:38","slug":"business_objects_buys_cartesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/business_objects_buys_cartesis.html","title":{"rendered":"Business Objects Buys Cartesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Business Objects just <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessobjects.com\/news\/press_release.asp?id=20070422_005093\">announced<\/a> its intention to purchase <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\">Cartesis<\/a>, a leading finance and performance management company. The purchase had been a rumored for some time. <\/p>\n<p>I attended the presentation of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\/about\/management_team\/crispin_read\/\">Crispin Read<\/a>, Cartesis&#8217; CMO and a former (and now future) colleague, at the Gartner BI Conference in London earlier this year. The talk was entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/agendabuilder.gartner.com\/bie8i\/WebPages\/SessionDetail.aspx?EventSessionId=958\">From BI to Performance Management<\/a>&#8220;, and focused on the premise that BI has not delivered on the promise of financial performance management because &#8220;it&#8217;s like having traffic lights without color.&#8221; In other words, there&#8217;s no point in measurement unless the correct targets have been defined using a robust, financially-focused performance management system. <\/p>\n<p>For me, the highlights of the aquisition are the industrial-strength <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\/solutions\/financial_consolidation\/\">financial consolidation<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\/solutions\/intercompany_reconciliation\/\">intercompany reconciliation<\/a> tools that will boost Business Objects&#8217; position with CFOs of large organizations, and Cartesis&#8217; leadership role in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\/solutions\/benchmarking\/\">XBRL publishing and benchmarking<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>XBRL is a&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.xbrl.org\/WhatIsXBRL\/\">open format<\/a> for reporting financial information. A key part of BI 2.0 will be the ability to easily augment internal analysis with outside figures, and Cartesis provides their customers with: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>&#8220;a unique solution to benchmark their own actual and financial forecast figures with competitive and peer-group data for externally focused business performance management.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>According to research commissioned by Cartesis last year, 84% of companies recognize the importance of benchmarking financial performance, but only 31% do so. Cartesis has a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fsn.co.uk\/channel_financial_reporting\/cartesis_takes_the_lead_on_xbrl_for_performance_benchmarking_and_kpis.htm\">partnership<\/a> with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edgar-online.com\/\">Edgar Online<\/a>, which provides information from US company reports using XBRL, to make it easy to &#8220;mashup&#8221; internal and external financial data.<\/p>\n<p>Culturally, the companies should be a good fit.&nbsp;Cartesis is also a &#8220;transnational organization&#8221;, headquartered in Paris but with a mix of European and US values. The CEO, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartesis.com\/en\/about\/management_team\/didier_benchimol\/\">Didier Benchimol<\/a>, is French with extensive experience of the international software market, and many of the sales and marketing staff are former employees of Business Objects. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Business Objects just announced its intention to purchase Cartesis, a leading finance and performance management company. The purchase had been a rumored for some time. I attended the presentation of Crispin Read, Cartesis&#8217; CMO and a former (and now future) colleague, at the Gartner BI Conference in London earlier this year. The talk was entitled [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[225,725,1150],"class_list":["post-11875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bi-20","tag-cartesis","tag-mashup","tag-xbrl"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-35x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}