Business Objects Reviews

Pros

Good pay. Good benefits. Some good people. Office has a gym/games room.

Cons

Aggressive performance metrics based on closure of customer incidents. All incidents are counted the same regardless of difficulty. This leads to some employees working the system by insisting all customers create new incident's for each small question.

Mandatory "on call" overtime which is payed at a flat rate regardless of how much work is actually done.

No raise in 2 years.

Rare to find opportunities to advance.

Advice to Senior Management

Put more reliance on customer satisfaction, and less on incidents closed. Make after hours support optional.

Pros

Fast paced company
Very flexible
Decisions are taken quickly
Administrative burden is kept to a minimum
Great atmosphere, management really cares about the employees

Cons

Sometimes not very organized, lack of formal processes which results in many last minute ad-hoc requests
Not enough opportunities for trainings (internal or external)

Advice to Senior Management

Even after the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, it is very important to keep the Business Objects spirit alive within SAP ! Don't allow Business Objects to be "disintegrated".

Pros

I'm employed in a tough economy. I get to travel and meet with a diverse and interesting set of customers. We have widely adopted products that are decent.

Cons

Since SAP purchased us, we are more like employee numbers than people. Quotas are applied, but individuals have no real control over whether they're attained because management doles out assignments to opportunities. Teamwork and cooperation is now discouraged under the new compensation model and we are much more isolated. I've been with the company for over 10 years and I've never seen morale so low.

Advice to Senior Management

Change the compensation model for presales and account executives or we will continue to hemorrhage good sales people from the business intelligence business. It is the only market that is still growing in this down economy and we are investing very little into making it successful.

Pros

If you are straight out of college, entry-level or don't have experience selling to larger companies Bobj is a good place to get your footing in the technology sales industry.

The Vancouver office is very well equipped with parking on the roof (pay), multiple kitchens, a lounge, a sleeping room and a full-sized gym with yoga room, onsite massage therapy and games room.

Cons

SAP has not handled this acquisition well. Two years later, we still don't know what products we can sell and how to sell them. We cannot even provide a price quote to our prospects without confirming with multiple groups that the pricing policy is the same as the week before and approvals are the same. Commissions are rarely paid on time and correctly, and our on target earnings are 30k less than they were last year. Nobody in this office has any power to influence the decisions that affect our jobs and our productivity. There are too many roadblocks to doing our jobs - it's like this company is trying to make it impossible for us to sell.

Advice to Senior Management

Ask front-line employees how they would recomment improvements be made

Pros

Pay was above the scale- in some cases way above
company allowed people flex time when needed.

Cons

consumed so many small companies that it was difficult to keep up with the changes
SAP ruined everything about BOBJ- every 10 minutes you were sent an email from some SVP of Global Whatever Business Division outlining the changes that will happen in the future that will solve all your problems.

Advice to Senior Management

Get SAP to divest themselves of BOBJ

Pros

The compensation varied from acceptable to outstanding depending on your citizenship status and how well upper management perceived your abilities. Some of the employees are impressive, hard-working folks with a knack for ingenuity.

Cons

I personally know of non-US resident employees being paid 20-40% less than equally qualified U.S. citizens for the same job title and responsibilities. There's constant unspoken pressure to obfuscate the ugly truths about licensing, maintenance, support, and consulting. Like every software vendor, this is a company whose unspoken creed is "do whatever it takes to bag the deal, get a contract and PO, and get the hell on to closing other busineess, and let consulting and support sweep up the mess 6 months later."

SAP senior leadership magnified the problems at BOBJ, making this the kind of place where grandiose emails announcing sweeping improvements would arrive weekly from strange-sounding Directors, VPs, and SVPs whose names you'd never heard on the previous 200 such emails. Who are these 'managers,' and where do they come from? It seems there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Often those 'sweeping' changes would be nothing more than regurgitated ideas that had been tried by past management. In short order, the whole company seemed to be on a wash-and-spin cycle of glorious emails purporting the virtues of SAP while ignoring the reality in the trenches: slashed wages, layoffs, complicated infrastructure and politics, system problems, and so forth. Like too much sweet frosting masking the cracks in ugly wedding cake.

Certainly, newly minted MBAs who can't see the forest or the trees will accelerate quickly here, finding a ready-made home as VP or SVP or the latest Department du Jour.

Advice to Senior Management

Make the PDP process two-ways: meaning, employees review managers anonymously and that feedback must factor into the manager's bonus (at least 25% of it). It's a simple, elegant, egalitarian way to weed out bad management and promote honesty and fairness in treatment and compensation of subordinates.

Pros

There are good people working for the company. Since it is original a French company, it provides opportunties to gain international experiences. The company does focus on community involment. Benefit is good with matching 401K program, stock option, Employee Stock Purchase Plan,...

Cons

Salary is average compared to other similar companies. High turn over in the sales team. The market that Business Objects in is very competitive. Limited growth opportunity.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide frequent communcation and share more information.

Pros

Good place to start after graduation. Good company to put on your resume when you leave. Many companies recognize how hard Business Objects pushes their employees. Many employees have left and found new jobs with half the job duties and roles with more pay, recognition, and respect.

Cons

Weak career pathing. Management is out of touch with employees. No accountability for poor decision making. High attrition rate leaves the company with very little skilled employees. Employees are micro-managed with metrics without any context behind them.

Advice to Senior Management

The Ivory Tower style of management should be torn down. Stop and listen to front line employees for once.

Pros

Business Objects was a medium sized tech firm. It was a great place to work if you wanted to experience Big Company life without having to take a position at a large company.

This was a great place to implement ideas, if you were willing to follow through on them yourself. Even our interns were developing features in our products (perhaps 10% of the engineering staff were interns, most of whom were working on shippable features).

Really good salary for new grads.

The Vancouver office is very well located. (From what I can tell, most of their big offices have great locations).

People are very friendly and easy to get along with.

Cons

There's not a lot of community recognition. If you drop the name at a party, you'll almost always get blank stares. This is even more true now that they have been purchased by SAP -- the brand recognition in the tech community of either Business Objects or SAP is unfortunately low.

The salary, at least in Vancouver, is really high for new graduates, and really low for people with some experience. It was very common for someone to start working at BOBJ right out of school and make 10k more than their peers at other companies. However, in three years, they would be make 20-40k less than the same people elsewhere.

The product is made for the business sector, this may not be interesting for many purely technical people.

There are very, very few perks for working for this employer. You come to the office, you do some work, you go home and get a cheque in the mail. They do offer bike storage, a gym and a foosball table, but that's about it.

Over time, the office has lost more and more benefits. Stock options are gone, stock purchase plans are gone, health benefits are getting worse every year, retirement benefits get worse every year, bonus payout formulas are constantly readjusted to lower the payout (or so it seems), company bar-b-q's are being cancelled, etc. All of the good reasons for working here are systematically being removed, and there is no replacement.

There is very little company loyalty amongst employees.

In the development side of the business there is a huge stigma associated with being a Software Developer. There are basically two kinds of people: Developers, and everyone else (QA, translation staff, IT, PgM, Tech Writers, etc.). If you weren't a developer, you were looked down upon -- this was especially noticeable during bonus time or salary review time.

Advice to Senior Management

People don't stay here long term for a reason. You should really look at how you can increase long term retention.

Pros

They have great benefits and hire a lot of smart people.

Cons

Since the SAP acquisition, the place has really gone down the drain. Business Objects was never a perfect place to work, but it was pretty good before SAP purchased the company. SAP is extremely secretive. Throughout the year, waves of lay-offs in various parts of the company were never addressed by senior leadership. You heard through word of mouth--usually by knowing someone in a group that had lay-offs. SAP replaced all of Business Objects customer facing systems and processes, then refused to accept any responsibility for declines in customer satisfaction and sales. I heard one senior manager address this in a group setting by saying "we let you run as a separate company for the rest of the year precisely so you couldn't blame us for this stuff". At the rate at which people are being laid off or leaving voluntarily, I would expect the Business Objects product quality to drop as its revenue increases in the next few years. Many people in leadership positions at SAP seem to view their customers as nearly a captive audience. The Business Objects product may lure in a few customers, but it mostly seems to be something else they can coerce existing customers into spending money on.

Advice to Senior Management

Business Objects success came because of its people. Our "enterprise lock-in" came about through creating a great product that customers didn't want to give up. They weren't locked in because they'd spent too much money to abandon ship. I once thought the SAP acquisition would be the end of an independent Business Intelligence sector. As I see former Business Objects (and Crystal) people fleeing for smaller B.I. and analytics software companies, I realize that's not the case. Poor personnel management has probably planted the seeds for a half dozen small,but innovative competitors to emerge.