The 2009 GBN Conference, held in Dallas this past week, was more of an Xcelsius Festival than a Global BusinessObjects Network event. As Saskia Battersby, Product Manager for Xcelsius, mentioned in her Xcelsius Roadmap session…“four years ago, we had to fight to get one Xcelsius session accepted at the Annual BusinessObjects Conference. Today more than half the tracks and sessions are about Xcelsius.” Even more impressive was that her session was the last session of the conference, when most people were heading for the airport in a heavy rainstorm and yet, despite that, the room was packed. The first ever “Xcelsius Gurus” social gathering organized by gurus Mico Yuk and Ryan Goodman, and sponsored by SAP, was held the evening before. It was easily the highlight of the entire conference with 150 happy, energized people in attendance experiencing the type of excitement and fun we have not seen since Business Objects was a young and exciting company – remember those days? Xcelsius is definitely the hottest product at SAP right now, and it is spreading faster than the swine flu virus. It is being integrated into the front-end of SAP’s ERP modules while it is also being bundled into hundreds of OEM applications – just popping up everywhere. What makes it so different to other SAP BO products, with the exception of Crystal Reports, is that it can easily and inexpensively be deployed outside of the SAP and BO Enterprise platforms, as well as within them. This has also made it very challenging for SAP to control it, but that is one of the reasons why it is so popular; following in the footsteps of Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Crystal Reports. Hopefully this is intentional on the part of SAP, because Xcelsius is one of the best things going for them right now.
Xcelsius Festival
Published: October 27, 2009Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, Xcelsius
About the Author
Paul Grill started his career in Information Technology in the U.K. in 1978, as an Executive Data Processing Trainee for Honeywell. More than thirty years later, he still has a voracious appetite for learning as Information Technology continues to advance at an ever accelerating pace. He was first introduced to the world of Business Intelligence in 1991, in France, when he saw a demonstration of an early version of BusinessObjects on Windows 2.1. He returned to the U.S. to rave about this phenomenal product, but it was many years before BusinessObjects made it into the mainstream. Paul founded InfoSol in 1997, and made Business Intelligence one of the key solutions offered by the company. Today, InfoSol is a leading SAP BusinessObjects solutions partner, known for its expert consulting, education and innovative add-on solutions. Paul is well known within the SAP BusinessObjects community for his extensive knowledge of Business Intelligence, and he has lectured and written many articles on the subject. Paul enjoys writing, running and coaching kids soccer, and is passionate about Ancient Egyptology.