Well into the first quarter of its Business Objects acquisition, SAP has worked to clarify its Corporate Performance Management strategy and road map, an exercise that really boils down to rationalizing a bulging portfolio of products from a mix of companies -- and tucking the whole thing under a new Performance Optimization Division umbrella (a sendoff on SAP's business user group that was combined with Business Objects).

Essentially the new division is coming to market with a combination of SAP apps -- including those from its Pilot Software and OutlookSoft acquisitions -- and Business Object's portfolio that includes apps acquired from Cartesis and ALG Software. The way the whole Performance Optimization stack pans out is this: Underlying a set of GRC (governance, risk and compliance) and CPM (corporate performance management) applications is SAP's Business Intelligence Platform. The platform consists of Business Objects' Information Discovery & Delivery, Data Layer, and Enterprise Information Management tools. SAP's Financial Performance Management suite -- a subset of EPM -- is where SAP and Business Objects overlapped quite a bit. And where SAP has rationalized its development dollar spending going forward.

Financial Performance Management is actually four separate categories that include software from both SAP and Business Objects.

Here's the breakdown of what's being funded going forward. SAP has requested a bit of a nuance change to reflect its continued investment in OutlookSoft, so here it is:

Strategy -- SAP Strategy Management (formerly Pilot Software)
Planning -- SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (formerly OutlookSoft)
Consolidation -- SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (formerly OutlookSoft) and BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation (formerly Cartesis)
Profitability -- BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management (formerly ALG Software)

The products that fall into the Financial Performance Management suite will receive the lion's share of funding -- which translates to development dollars -- from SAP, according to Doug Merritt, EVP & GM of Performance Optimization Applications for Business Objects, an SAP company. (Merritt is also president of SAP Labs and a corporate officer with SAP AG.) The rest of the products not on the list will be supported for the next several years, according to Merritt.

"We're more being clear of where the bulk of attention will go -- and giving [customers] a lot of time to switch," said Merritt. "The emphasis from the Performance Optimization Division includes all the financial performance management software we're talking about. [Our mission] is to deliver the next generation of automation capability for business user-centric tasks -- by nature those tend to be far less repetitive processes that are meaningfully more collaborative and ad hoc than the processes that all of in ERP have seen."

I spoke with Merritt last week after SAP announced its "spending priorities" for the new division. One thing I thought was interesting is that SAP plans to expand its business user focus beyond the Office of the CFO -- an area hotly contested by Oracle, which is also taking the approach of tapping financial processes with BI functionality. Merritt said over the next 24 months SAP will expand its focus to likely include sales, operations and marketing.

"Most of the users I approach, they don't want tools," said Merritt. "They want something that is pretty finished. They still want to use Excel to plan, but they want the ability to very rapidly populate that with templates and structures that would suit [their] planning needs. And have that connected to data sources that are important, to include [things like] tags and data threads of numbers, with lots of good algorithms built in to help do good modeling."

As for the future of SAP's BI/Business Warehouse tools, here's how Gartner outlined it:

"The strategic focus on BI tools for SAP NetWeaver BI/BW will be on the new Premium offerings based on the Business Objects product portfolio. The SAP NetWeaver B/BW I tools will continue to be available. However, beyond the release of NetWeaver 7.0 EhP1 in 2008, no further enhancements will be made to the NetWeaver BI tools that include BEx Report Designer, BEx Web Analyzer [and] BEx Web Application Designer. The SAP BI Accelerator (in-memory analytics technology) will continue to be an area of investment, as will SAP BW as a source of consolidated data."