Boston and Business Objects is a good combination, made even better with an eclectic audience of press and analysts eager to observe the gestalt of the SAP-BOBJ merger. Indeed at this week’s Business Objects Influencer Summit the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, as SAP and BOBJ execs positioned their company as more than just a BI vendor.

Executives Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales; Marge Breya, EVP and GM of the BI Platform group; and Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications variously made the case that Business Objects is collapsing complex applications, data integration, analytical capabilities into a multi-disciplinary-yet-unified portfolio. Breya in particular highlighted the range of the company’s analytics and reporting functionality, called Information Discovery and Delivery (IDD), which she adeptly propped up against BOBJ’s EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) and GRC (Governance, Regulatory, and Compliance) capabilities.

Business Objects has accomplished what other BI and data integration vendors have failed to do, to wit: they’ve painted a broad landscape of business information deployment that colors in data integration rather than hastily sketching it. Notwithstanding whatever behind-the-scenes wrangling took place between SAP and Business Objects, the result is a deliberate, full-spectrum knowledge deployment strategy that highlights the role of integrated data in the overall solution platform.

The summit covered a lot of ground, from metadata to predictive analytics to data governance to master data management. While BOBJ couldn’t resist the woeful me-tooist afterthought that is “Analytic MDM,”—me: If you’re rigorous about operational MDM, your customers will reap the BI benefits and you needn’t hang a separate shingle—its evolving MDM prowess was on display. The Jill Dyche /Philip Russom /Rob Karel salvos received return fire. Nice work, guys.

(A brief Honorable Mention interlude here to analytic MDM vendor Kalido, whose erstwhile partnership with BOBJ was, er, inadvertently omitted. Kalido deserves due props for pioneering so-called analytic MDM, which is really more about the business-driven modeling of sustained reference data and arguably ahead of its time.)

Having Microsoft speak as a customer reference can be seen as either a savvy marketing move or a disingenuous display of confidence, or both. (The software giant uses BOBJ’s GRC BI to vet its customers against trade screening watch lists.) As analysts begin to poke the squishy center of Microsoft’s commitment to enterprise BI, Business Objects, an SAP company, has solid moving-forward strategy.

Technorati tags: bobjsummit08, Business Objects Influencer Summit, SAP Business Intelligence, SAP MDM, Master Data Management