Business intelligence tools vendor Business Objects has added detail to its product roadmap following its acquisition last year of Crystal Decisions. The plan includes a three-stage integration strategy, and migration tools for customers forced to move from discontinued products.

Products due to be phased out include Crystal's portal, which will be replaced by Business Objects' InfoView product; and Business Objects' own Online Analytical Processing (Olap) client, which will be replaced by the Crystal Analysis Olap client. Customers will be moved onto licences for the new products, said the firm.

Full integration between the two product sets will not be completed until the second half of 2005. However, users will be offered an integration pack, due to ship in the second quarter of this year, to provide front-end integration between the two sets of products.

Future software will be developed with a single infrastructure for user administration, security and report scheduling, based on Crystal Enterprise.

The first of these applications will be BusinessObjects 11, due in the fourth quarter of this year.

Users not wishing to migrate to the new infrastructure can stick with Enterprise 6.5, which is due in the second quarter, with a further release due one year later. This will be supported for at least 18 months from the second quarter of 2005, according to Dave Kellogg, the firm's senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

Andy Bitterer, vice president of technology research services at analyst Meta Group, was impressed by the integration strategy. "The more you can buy from one supplier the better for you as a client to reduce costs," he said. "The product overlap is insignificant. I don't think I've ever seen a better merger from a planning point of view."

But Bitterer added that there are still gaps the firm could address.

"Data quality and data profiling is one," he said. "Business Objects has a partner strategy for that but it could make a lot of sense to have data quality as part of the infrastructure stack."

Business Objects has also changed the support and licensing costs for some of Crystal Decision's products. Software maintenance costs will be set at 20 percent across both product lines, marking a five percent reduction for Crystal users. Charges for software licences for Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Analysis are both being increased by about 15 percent, although the cost of Crystal Reports will remain unchanged.

Neal Thompson, director of strategic business technologies at travel and incentive company Maritz, said he expected to shave about 20 percent off his costs of using Business Objects and Crystal products as a result of the changes.