Business Objects Turns 30 — How BOBJ Changed My Life and For Others in the IT Industry
Happy Birthday Business Objects! Business Objects or as a lot of people know it as ‘BOBJ’, turns 30 this month and I wanted to take this opportunity to look back at how it changed my life and what I was able to achieve. I also got on board some of my fellow BOBJ experts who wanted to share their Business Objects highlights.
My Story
Business Objects made my entire carrier. When I graduated from my master’s degree in 1998 the first thing I did was work as a consultant around BOBJ. Funny enough at that time the client wanted to kick out BOBJ with BW (which ended by SAP acquiring BOBJ)! Yet still today my very first client is still leveraging BOBJ. I worked for a few years in France, Australia, and the US. What amazed me was everywhere you go around the globe you will always find a Frenchie from the very first BOBJ days. It also created a community of BOBJ addicts, or dinosaurs as I called them.
Business Objects also made me an entrepreneur. I founded GB&SMITH 13 years ago to address a need around security management. It was a BIG pain at that time and was a side effect from merging things such as Universes and WebI with Crystal architecture. Since then we’ve grown our presence and I am now based in Boston — this was a big change from Bordeaux to Boston in my personal life, yet it allows me to think big. I remembered the very early days when we sponsored the Business Objects APJ partner Summit in 2008. No fear to be a 2 men company sponsoring the event with big companies such as SAP, Sybase, IBM, HP…
It also allows me to operate globally and realize how impactful BOBJ is, discovering that millions of users and thousands of companies still rely on BOBJ 30 years later! It has had an amazing impact on most of the Fortune 500 companies and the biggest government agencies! You can always discover crazy things like deployment of 300k+ users (NO TYPO 300 000 users!). I am also always saying that unlike US entrepreneurs counterparts, in France we really only have one success story in software. All my French peers are still talking about Bernard and Denis as their role models! Ultimately thanks to this amazing success story I had the chance to meet one of the 2 founders, Denis. He saw that we were successful and decided to join our board.
BUT WAIT, look at what you two achieved:
- First European company listed on the NASDAQ (after only 4 years of operation).
- No email, no internet, no cell phones, no low-cost airlines… How did you do it?!
- Named Entrepreneur of the Year with Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg
You can find more insights here with Denis or here with Bernard.
You are the real superheroes! Chapeau Bas! (For non-French speakers: Hats off to you both!)
It seems I am not the only one to be amazed at what you guys did. Even the “competition” still acknowledges the amazing things that you achieved! During a Tableau internal boot camp and in BI history you were named as the early ones. Below are some pictures that were taken during the early BOBJ days.
How such an obvious idea can disrupt an entire industry! You definitely invented something new, and certainly something big.
Denis Payre
Founder of Business Objects. CEO of Nature & People First.
As one of the two founders of the company, Business Objects has obviously changed my life. One of my most vivid memories was our humble beginnings when we could not afford to take a salary for about one year but were obviously paying our first employees and were renting a cheap shared office in the Paris suburb with a smelly old carpet and a decade-old sofa in the lobby full of holes in it. On a very hot day of July 1990, it was so hot that we checked the money available in the company bank account and we rushed to spend almost all of it to buy a portable AC system. The next vivid memory was just over 4 years later watching the famous CNN commentator Lou Dobbs opening its Moneyline show announcing our record IPO on NASDAQ which had just been 20 times oversubscribed. And 25 years later, it is a great source of pride when I meet former employees often together with their families who tell me how much being an employee and a shareholder of the company has changed their lives. Hard work sometimes pays off.
Patrick Perrier
Analytics Director, Center of Excellence (CoE) at GB&SMITH.
I certainly didn’t think when I first worked with Crystal Reports in 1994 as part of my computer degree in Québec, Canada that I would still work with it 26 years later and in Europe! It’s really in 2001 that it all started though when I joined the technical architecture support team of Crystal Decisions in London, UK.
Back then, Business Objects and Crystal Decisions were big competitors. They were for us anyway! To this day I remember one day walking to the office and we all had a bar of soap on our desks. Everybody thought it was very funny — being a native French speaker, I didn’t get the joke straight away. I only got it days later when somebody explained that the sticker on it with “Wash the BO away” was a pun at BO = Business Objects!
The rest is history. They bought us in 2003. I feel very lucky as that gave me even more career opportunities, the chance to meet great people and travel to amazing places all around the world. And a special thought for those after event parties in Las Vegas and Barcelona!
Timo Elliott
VP, Global Innovation Evangelist at SAP.
My first task at Business Objects was assembling desks. In March of 1991, I had a short job interview with founder Bernard Liautaud, sitting on his comfortable couch in a lovely apartment at the chic end of the 7th arrondissement. I remember nodding tentatively when he asked if I’d heard of Oracle databases, but then struggling to follow the rest of the conversation — because the only Oracle I knew was a now-long-dead “Teletext” service that transmitted information to households using unused portions of TV signals. But Bernard took pity on me, and I was hired to do telesales with a start date of April Fool’s Day. There were just eight of us, sitting on cardboard boxes in an empty office space, half-way up a 1970s business tower in the Paris suburbs. The IKEA desks arrived a few days later, and since I didn’t have any actual expertise in anything, I ended up putting most of them together. For a while this turned into a startup tradition: every new employee would be handed a big cardboard IKEA furniture box on their first day and told to get on with it — this lead to many baffled looks from big-company salespeople wondering what on earth they’d gotten themselves into. I spent the first week or two learning the product. It was called “SkipperSQL” at the time and included revolutionary user interface features such as resizable windows. Then Bernard and I sat at opposite ends of the open space, and over the phone, he pretended to be a customer and I, in execrable French (I was the first native anglophone at the company) attempted to sell him on the merits of a meeting with one of our salespeople. I was so bad at this that I was immediately demoted to marketing, where I have been (very happily) ever since.
Chris Sieverts
Scrum Master at Commonwealth Financial Network.
BOBJ was rightly heralded for the semantic layer that made data analysis accessible to the SQL illiterate. For myself, the real gold was found in the passionate, collaborative & relational BOBJ/BOB community and created in me a life-long commitment to the power of community. While I am no longer deep in BI, as an Agile Coach, my focus continues to be nurturing collaboration in others so they can experience the value that community brings to what we create, enhancing both our jobs and our personal lives. I am deeply grateful for the friendships formed at BOBJ and BOB which remain important in my life.
Chris Pohl
Retired Domain Architect DS/BI & Reporting Tools at BNYM.
Business Objects was definitely a game-changer…it was cutting edge software. Bernard’s semantic layer was an early paradigm shift in how reports (and more generally data analysis) happened in a corporate environment. It was fun watching the toolset grow and mature over the years.
On a personal level, Business Objects brought many of us together. From the user groups to the AOL listserv, to BOB, to User Conferences, to EPIC USER CONFERENCE PARTIES…solid friendships formed — friendships that have lasted to this day.
Michael Welter
CEO at Ark Analytic Solutions.
It was in 1999 when I first got involved with Business Objects. I was working at Verizon Wireless, and we needed an automated reporting solution. After evaluating numerous solutions, we chose Business Objects, and my life hasn’t been the same since then. I left Verizon in 2002, to enter the world of consulting. Through my participation in the BUSOBJ listserve, and then BOB, that I realized how great the people in the Business Objects community are. In my efforts to give back to the community, I became recognized as an expert in Business Objects. Now, more than 20 years later, I still love working with Business Objects and helping other people learn the tool as well.
Raphael Branger
Member, Board of Directors at IT-Logix AG.
I started my career in 2002 as a 19-year-old young guy at IT-Logix. On my first day, I was presented with a CD-ROM of Crystal Reports 8. I learned how to develop reports and how to publish them on Crystal Enterprise. Only 18 months later, Crystal was acquired by Business Objects. Against our initial fears, Business Objects did not replace Crystal Enterprise with Business Objects Enterprise but the other way round (except for the name ;) ). This was the ultimate chance for both IT-Logix as well as me personally to get access to companies and projects much bigger than before. I also remember the famous Business Objects user conferences which led the ground for my career as a regular speaker at national and international conferences. Meeting an international audience led to several strong relationships, for example, our long-lasting partnership with GB&SMITH which we know and value a lot since they started their business with Sébastien and Alex. Even though it feels like the best times for Business Objects as a BI product are over, the heritage of partnerships and friendships will live on!
Sathish Rajagopal
There are many moments for me in this 20+ year journey with Business Objects. If you ask me about the best moment in my life with Business Objects, it would be the opportunity I had to meet and spend some time with the co-founder of Business Objects — Mr. Denis Payre.
I had always admired how the founders had started the phenom called Business Objects — a simple to use desktop BI tool 30 years ago. Within seconds of me meeting with Mr. Payre, it was evident to me how and why they were so successful with their vision. What was supposed to be a 15-minute meeting turned out to be a 90-minute conversation. I saw the passion, the global view, and more importantly, his humility. He never, for a second, acted with pride but rather was interested in knowing what I had done in Business Objects all these years and wanted to hear my thoughts on future BI — Analytics business in general. It was an unforgettable experience.
Thank you, Mr. Bernard Liautaud and Mr. Denis Payre for your vision and being the source of inspiration and transforming many lives and businesses.
Tammy J. Datri
Director for Non-Certification Programs at PMI Pittsburgh Chapter.
Business Objects has been very key in both my professional career and personal accomplishments. I have had the honor to witness companies gain meaningful insight from their corporate data in ways that were not possible prior to implementing the Business Objects suite of products. Companies have been able to monitor metrics that helped guide their organizations to operate better and provide a higher quality product or service. I have seen major efficiencies identified and implemented through the use of data by improving performance, problem resolution, and increased sales based on analytics that they were able to produce through Business Objects. In addition, I have also been able to grow personally through various leadership roles within the Business Objects organizations and user community. My involvement has given me the opportunity to influence the future direction of the products and develop education, networking, and sharing opportunities across local, national, and international user groups through meetings, conference planning, influence councils, and customer advisory committees. The Business Objects community is unique in their willingness to share their experiences with others to help them achieve the same successes they have. I am grateful to have been able to use the products to help my organizations, help others develop solutions for their organizations and to be part of such a robust community.
Patrice Gobaut
Vice President, Relations Entreprise & PMO at Éstiam.
My view: August 1996 — forever
Me @ BusinessObjects: With my statistics and computer science diploma in my pocket, in 1996, I am planning to replace my 12-month military service by an 18-month service in a French Company in a foreign country.
I am looking at Bull, one of the French IT references at this time, Total and other big French companies.
One day, my dad tells me there is this small French company, Business Objects, “I don’t know if they will grow but contact them”, after an incredible interview with my future American manager that could not understand half of my words due to my poor English but trusted me due to the passion and will I had, I started my adventure at Business Objects
Here we go, Technical Support Engineer, R&D Quality Assurance Engineer, Internal Webmaster, BI Engineer, IT BI Project Manager, IT BO@BO Manager, Senior Manager, and Director for the roles I was lucky to have.
France Sales Business Unit, France R&D, US R&D, Worldwide IT for the organizations I worked for.
Puteaux, Levallois, San Jose, Vancouver, Maidenhead for the Office I worked in and most visited.
Business Objects has been my first real professional experience, I have been very lucky to land in there.
In my opinion, here are the 3 reasons why Business Objects was a success:
A Business advantage, Product, Sales and Growth Strategy
First, Denis and Bernard had a very smart idea in the growing area of Database, skipper SQL (that gave the name of the first Product) to allow the user to easily build reports on a database and creating this new domain, Business Intelligence. Nowadays, Business Intelligence is a foundation and mandatory in all medium and big companies. They were visionaries, but this is not enough to make a success story.
They were very good in the product strategy relying on young developers, French-based in the beginning, and in several other countries after; US, India, UK, etc…
Sales Strategy relying on young sales and networking with Partners.
Small company yes, the leader in BI yes, with an aggressive Sales strategy, no fear sales force, and an amazing market ahead.
Growth Strategy with a strong geographic presence in France and but with a very fast focus on the US. This vision to have focused rapidly on the US market was pretty innovative.
The execution was perfect in all domains.
Lead by Example, Values, Objectives, Communication
Lead by Example, Bernard Liautaud has led Business Objects by showing the way to all of us. Leader of several thousand employees with a clear vision, statement, direction, and objectives on one side and open, accessible, human on the other side. He managed the difficult balance very well.
Therefore as a Manager, every year I was thrilled to do the Vision/Statement/Objective with my manager and then with my team, a habit that allows all employees to feel aligned with the top management and company strategy.
Kick-off, coffee corners, communication were part of the normal agenda of the company. Being informed was an easy task at Business Objects.
It has been years now that Business Objects disappeared but the values I remember today are LCT2IP from Business Objects: Leadership, Customer Focus, Transnational Identity, Integrity, Innovation, and Passion — these 6 values were important and meaningful. Business Objects unity was possible thanks to the leadership, from top to bottom values were shared. “Each of us is a leader”.
This communication was great internally but also externally, I remember the buzz of going public on NASDAQ, proud to be part of the first French software company listed in the United States.
Business Objects User Conferences in the US, what a rendezvous, with employees from Sales, Technical Support, Marketing, R&D together with our customers. We were a family, the BOBJ family that linked to my 3rd point.
A human family.
“It was like a family”, “Work Hard, Party Hard”, “being supported”, “follow the leaders”, “lead by example”, these words summarize the environment of Business objects in many teams, countries in the 1990s when Business Objects has been growing fast. A startup mode with young and brilliant people having success like the big old companies.
There was a change compared to the classic computer science company, the average age, less than 30 in the 1990s, allowing us to make things differently, to think outside the box. Allowing many employees to learn, grow, and be successful.
Being a young, hard worker, we followed the rule “Work Hard, Party Hard”.
Work Hard: I remember frequent pizza hard-working evenings during product release.
Party Hard: Each opportunity to celebrate was taken, enforcing close relationships, the more we knew each other the better we were facing the challenges ahead. A family.
Team Building was in our DNA allowing a few hours to know each other and trust each other — better than 200 hours of boring meetings.
I remembered several incredible team events especially the Club Production one in Guadeloupe 100% R&D Employees — 100% fun.
BOBJ France, we had Magic BO Bands to ensure Live Music at parties.
In this safe environment, having an idea, sharing it, going for it was obvious and allowed many great internal initiatives in R&D, IT, Marketing, and in many locations.
More than a business family, it became my real family, being married to one of the Business Objects’ first employees (Caroline Dupin de Saint Cyr who became Caroline Gobautin in 1992) and we have a BOBJ kid together 😊.
Many many friends at our wedding worked at Business Objects at this time.
I am still very connected to many people I met at Business Objects wherever they are today in SAP, in other computer science companies, in education, freelance or in completely different domains. We are connected by this adventure: BOBJ.
Why am I still “BusinessObjects”?
Because in both professional and personal life I am known as “Mister Work Hard Party Hard” that I learned from my Business Objects time.
Because I kept many of my 50 Business Objects T-shirts, each event was a pretext to give a T-Shirt, cap, goodies for Attendees 😊.
Because Business Objects built me, allowed me to grow, to learn, to face challenges, not only because it was my first experience but especially because it was a 200 miles-an-hour adventure for the 12 years I stayed there with no boring moments. Always more!
Because I kept 6 LCT2IP values as a way of life.
Because I met my wife there.
Because I feel lucky to have been part of this adventure from 1996 to 2008.
Because I cried when Bernard Liautaud did a video for my farewell party of SAP.
Because if Bernard Liautaud tells me to follow him, no hesitation I will follow.
BOBJ for Ever.
Jean-Michel Cambot
Chief Technical Evangelist at Atempo.
1988…I was living as a hermit to launch a crazy project in an apartment under the roofs of the Marais in Paris. It started with a challenge — France Telecom at the time did not
understand what I was talking about — the objective was nothing less than to revolutionize the intelligence of decision-making by anticipating the impact that the “Client-Server” was going to have, another UFO in 1988. Once the first version was available on my portable sewing machine (Compaq), my software was called PilotSQL, I went to Microsoft (France) to offer them to edit it. I had no doubts about anything ;-). Microsoft (France) understood no more than FT and suggested that I go sell the idea directly to Bill Gates in the States. My first “American dream” was struggling to take shape. Already working with Oracle (France) on embedded SQL training systems, I finally decided to go show them my software. It was a good idea, which was quickly intercepted by Denis Payre and Bernard Liautaud, then at Oracle. It was becoming a more French dream, but without losing sight of the global dimension. Denis and Bernard then suggested I demo my software to Coface (which ousted Sybase suddenly to choose Oracle because of our choice to dedicate the software to Oracle), then to EDF / GDF, and very quickly, the potential of this disruptive AI approach appeared obvious, to accompany this new techno which will go far, the Client-Server. On June 20, 1990, Bernard, Denis, and I signed a software publishing agreement for PilotSQL, which later became SkipperSQL, and finally Business Objects. And this is where the American dream came true…
Thank you to everyone for sharing how Business Objects positively impacted your life — it is amazing at what has been achieved thanks to this great invention. Here’s to the next 30!
Feel free to join in the BOBJ throwback by sharing your best moments on LinkedIn or Twitter with the #BOBJthrowback. My team will certainly be sharing some photos!
