SAP Business Objects Aquisition

Dear Customer,

The integration of Business Objects into SAP provides great opportunities to serve you more effectively! While remaining a separate division, Business Objects together with SAP will focus on delivering performance optimization and business intelligence solutions that are open to any and all underlying data warehouse and transactional applications. One of the advantages of the integration is the utilization of a common support infrastructure. We are happy to share some details on the integration project with you today.

Starting July 7th 2008, the proven SAP Global Support Backbone will be used to support Business Objects solutions as well. This will provide benefits for you as customer/partner of Business Objects. The platform will enable us to improve quality of service over the coming months and years. For example, we will be able to accelerate our support processes and to improve the 24x7 support service. For joint customers of Business Objects and SAP, there are even more benefits. They will be able to better integrate the Business Objects products with the application management solution SAP Solution Manager.

In addition, leveraging the SAP Global Support Backbone will enable future support improvements for Business Objects customers. This includes enhanced possibilities for remote root-cause analysis, integration of quality management processes, and the provision of pro-active support services. All these features will improve the value of our support offerings for you even further.

Of course, we will minimize the impact of the changes on you as a customer/partner. However, minor changes will be unavoidable. We will communicate as early as possible so that you will be well prepared. Further information on upcoming changes is below.

Best regards,

Scott Bajtos
Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Satisfaction Officer

What is the SAP Global Support Backbone?

The SAP Global Support Backbone is SAP’s service and support infrastructure. It is used for delivery of proactive services, incident management, and software updates. It is fully integrated with SAP’s knowledge databases and communities (such as SAP Service Marketplace and SAP Community Network). Along with SAP’s remote supportability capabilities, there is a single integrated lifecycle management platform that allows mission-critical support, and a smooth information flow between SAP and its customers.

As part of the SAP Global Support Backbone, SAP Service Marketplace provides SAP customers, partners, and prospects with a central point of access to SAP's entire portfolio via the Internet. The SAP Service Marketplace is divided into multiple portals tailored to meet the needs of specific interest groups. Users have direct access to the information and can utilize support processes. In addition, the SAP Service Marketplace serves as technological platform and connects the SAP Solution Manager with SAP.

As one of the SAP Service Marketplace portals, the SAP Support Portal provides central access to the information, applications, and processes that are needed to optimally run an SAP solution. It contains applications that allow for creating cases (customer messages in SAP terminology), searching for Knowledge Base articles (SAP Notes), and downloading software.

The SAP Community Network is an open online community for SAP. It is a resource and collaboration channel for SAP developers, architects, consultants, administrators and integrators. SAP Community Network hosts forums, expert blogs , a technical library, downloads, a code gallery, E-learning catalogue, a wiki, and more. All these support open communication between active members of the community, which includes more than 1,000,000 members.

How to get in contact with Business Objects support in the future?

For customers and partners with Enterprise Technical Assurance, the main point of contact with Business Objects support will be SAP Service Marketplace. All named contacts of Business Objects will receive a personalized user and password within the next weeks to access SAP Service Marketplace. There, they will be able to find plenty of information regarding Business Objects products and services. And they get access to the available support applications in SAP Support Portal.

What will happen with Business Objects Forums?

The external user forums of Business Objects are public. To ensure that everyone can access these forums in the future, they will not move to the SAP Support Portal but to the SAP Community Network. There you can find moderated public forums, wikis, blogs, articles and other information. The Business Objects pages in the SAP Community Network are accessible already today via the URLs
Business Objects (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/category?categoryID=45) and
Business Objects SDK Application Development (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/category?categoryID=46)

How to renew Business Objects Maintenance and Support Agreements?

The Business Objects Maintenance Sales organization will continue to renew Business Objects Maintenance and Support agreements in the same fashion you are accustomed to. The interface with the group will be unchanged.

How does SAP Solution Manager support Business Objects products?

The SAP® Solution Manager application management solution supports SAP customers to implement, administer, support, operate, and monitor their SAP and also non-SAP systems. SAP Solution Manager runs in the customer IT landscape and facilitates the technical support of the systems, helping minimize risks and reduce total cost of ownership. Many customers of SAP have SAP Solution Manager deployed.

Much of the functionality provided by SAP Solution Manager can be used for managing non-SAP applications as well. So joint SAP and Business Objects customers can leverage SAP Solution Manager for their Business Objects solutions already today. In parallel to the support integration, SAP drives for a tighter integration of BOBJ products with SAP Solution Manager. For example, this includes the availability of Business Objects product information in the SAP Solution Manager repositories and the instrumentation of diagnostics tools for remote root-cause analysis. This all will ease the management of the IT solution for joint customers.

Where to find further information?