Bernard Liautaud

SAP BusinessObjects (a.k.a. BO, BOBJ) is an enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence (BI). BusinessObjects was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers worldwide in its final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP. Its flagship product is BusinessObjects XI, with components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects also offers consulting and education services to help customers deploy its business intelligence projects. Other toolsets enable universes (the BusinessObjects name for a semantic layer between the physical data store and the front-end reporting tool) and ready-written reports to be stored centrally and made selectively available to communities of the users.

Bernard Liautaud () co-founded in 1990 together with Denis Payre (), and was chief until September 2005, when he became chairman and chief until January 2008. The concept of and its initial implementation came from Jean-Michel Cambot. According to Bernard Liautaud, Jean-Michel is an extraordinarily creative developer, someone who authored the initial concept of BusinessObjects.

In 1990, the first customer, Coface, was signed. The company went public on NASDAQ in September 1994, making it the first European software company listed in the United States. In 2002, the company made Time Magazine Europe's Digital Top 25 of 2002 and were BusinessWeek Europe Stars of Europe.

On 7 October 2007, SAP AG announced that it would acquire BusinessObjects for $6.8B. As of 22 January 2008, the corporation is fully operated by SAP; this is seen as part of a growing consolidation trend in the business software industry, with Oracle acquiring Hyperion in 2007 and IBM acquiring Cognos in 2008.