So Oracle bought Hyperion. SAP bought Pilot. IBM continues to sniff around Cognos.
Why did BusinessObjects make a move for Cartesis? Well nobody gave me a heads up until I read Data Doghouse but I will throw some unsolicited insights into the mix.
Cartesis is very much a key performance indicator (KPI) and business performance management (BPM) vendor: its all about dashboards and bringing business information to decision makers. Compliance yadda yadda yadda. So much so what. But Cartesis has some really interesting differentiation in its toolbox. Most notably, it seems to be the company that first truly understood what eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) meant, and implemented technology and strategy accordingly. What’s so interesting about Cartesis impementation of XBRL, I hear you cry, isn’t that just some heavyweight schema for accounting that noone is going to implement, financial services compliance mandates notwithstanding? Well yes and no. What Cartesis realised was that XBRL allows benchmarking of different businesses in the same industry. Its good to be able to get an answer to what’s my cost of goods sold? what is my day sales outstanding (DSO)? What’s my R&D budget? But its even better to know how you compare to close competitors.
Cartesis partners with online information provider Edgar Online, which exports financial service data in XBRL, and allows customers to benchmark themselves against competitors using live data, which has to be accurate under Sarbanes-Oxley. Which is cool. Its possible to benchmark your corporate performance against your peers on a range of different axes. Like I say, its good stuff. Benchmarking as a service with certified data.
disclosure: IBM is a client. SAP is a target.
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