January 15, 2007

Business Objects: Rent-A-Center A Happy CRM Customer

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

CRM customer analytics vendor Business Objects would like to you know that Rent-A-Center, a rent-to-own operator in the U.S., has been using its recently-released Business Objects XI release 2 to "manage its significant expansion rate due to organic growth and major acquisitions."

"As we continue to grow, the amount of data we collect has expanded significantly," said Tony Fuller, CIO of Rent-A-Center, adding that Business Objects has helped his company "consolidate, process, and analyze data from several disparate sources to gain insight into our customers and our merchandising efforts, among other things."

The recent Business Objects XI release 2 has been billed as providing retailers with the most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. The company was recently ranked as one of the top ten software vendors in the retail industry, based on a survey of senior retail executives conducted by RIS News, BO officials say.

Business Objects, a vendor of business intelligence (BI) products, has announced it has acquired Nsite Software, Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based software-as-a-service provider.

The acquisition, according to Business Objects officials, gives Business Objects "access to Nsite's on-demand application platform, engineering talent experienced in building and managing SaaS (News - Alert) offerings and approximately 27,000 current Nsite subscribers."

The acquisition is expected to accelerate and expand the ability for Business Objects to deliver on-demand business intelligence products. Terms of the transaction, completed today, were not disclosed.

"As a specialist in software as a service, Nsite has developed a large customer base and considerable expertise in developing a platform for using and building on-demand applications," said Steven Lucas, vice president of strategic markets at Business Objects.

Nsite's application platform lets users build, customize, and deploy on-demand products delivering enterprise application functionality via browser. Nsite provides drag-and-drop functionality and uses asynchronous Java and XML (AJAX) technology. The platform is integrated with salesforce.com customer relationship management, and includes a wizard for building easy point-and-click web services integrations to other applications.

In October Business Objects announced the general availability of Business Objects Data Quality XI for Siebel Customer Relationship Management Applications.

The product, powered by Business Objects Data Quality XI Release 2, provides a single integrated data quality platform that scales across operating and application environments. Now users of Oracle's (News - Alert) Siebel CRM Applications can access data for their customer relationship management initiatives.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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Internet Protocol (IP)	X
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more

Voice over IP (VoIP)	X
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more

Extensible Markup Language (XML)	X
eXtensible Markup Language is a data formatting standard that can be integrated into On-Line Analytical Processing a multi-dimensional database architecture and other protocols such as SOAP (next) and...more

(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/-business-objects-business-intelligence-/2007/01/15/2245339.htm)