According to an article on CRN yesterday, Business Objects has released a scaled down version of BO Enterprise designed for Mid-Market companies who didn’t want to spend six figures on a reporting platform. They have resurrected the name “Crystal Decisions” for this product line and priced it starting at $20K. It is essentially identical to the larger BO Enterprise product, but is single server and has slightly fewer configuration options.

What I found even more interesting is the description of how this product plays into the BO partner strategy. Apparently BO has trimmed profit margins on Partner deals as they relate to Enterprise customers, encouraging the partners to focus instead on smaller companies. BO is clearly claiming the Enterprise level customer base as off-limits to partners, something that the partners have been unhappy with, but unwilling to discuss publicly. Services related to Crystal Decisions will be the exclusive domain of the partners. Why the split? Because the Enterprise customers are the high profit margin and low overhead while mid market are just the opposite.

If you are an enterprise level customer, and don’t want to be stuck with the ‘high profit margin’ Crystal Reports training services, give me a call. And, thanks to Dave Sharpe of BellSouth for giving me the first link to this article.