The company claimed more than 46,000 customers in its final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP.
Other toolsets enabled universes (the Business Objects 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.
[citation needed] The concept of Business Objects and its initial implementation came from Jean-Michel Cambot.
As of 22 January 2008, the corporation was fully operated by SAP; this was 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. Business Objects had two headquarters in San Jose, California, and Paris, France, but their biggest office was in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Business Objects subsequently released a new version of Data Integrator (11.7.2) which removed the infringing product capability.