Kellblog covers topics related to starting, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups including strategy, marketing, positioning, management, go-to-market, SaaS metrics, and venture capital.
It seems to me that SAP hasn’t spent energy much getting the Business Objects story out, particularly when you consider that they spent $6.8B to buy them. What I do hear about the strategy, the integration, the overall story, I get through my BOBJ alumni backchannel.
Thus I was pleased to find that Business Objects employee #8, Timo Elliott, has recently posted a video to his blog that does a great job of covering what (I think is) the SAP / Business Objects story at the 101 (i.e., introductory) level. It’s 23 minutes long, and it feels a bit like a training session, but if you want a comprehensive walk through the story, I don’t know a better place to get it.
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups. I am an executive-in-residence (EIR) at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to startup challenges having 10 years’ experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across 10+ companies ranging in size from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru (cybersecurity training), Jiminny (conversation intelligence), and Scoro (work management).
I previously served on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (agtech), Nuxeo (content services), Profisee (MDM), and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
I periodically speak to strategy and entrepreneurship classes at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).
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Dave, your readers might be interested my summary of the presentation here: http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/01/business-objects-and-sap/Darren