SAP BusinessObjects BI (also known as BO or BOBJ) is a suite of front-end applications that allow business users to view, sort and analyze business intelligence data. The suite includes the following key applications: Crystal Reports -- Enables users to design and generate reports Xcelsius/Dashboards -- Allows users to create interactive dashboards that contain charts and graphs for visualizing data Web Intelligence -- Provides a self-service environment for creating ad hoc queries and analysis of data both online and offline Explorer -- Allows users to search through BI data sources using an iTunes-like interface. Users do not have to create queries to search the data and results are shown with a chart that indicates the best information match.The Central Management Server (CMS) is responsible for maintaining a database of information about your BusinessObjects Enterprise system, which other components can access. The data stored by the CMS includes information about users and groups, security levels, BusinessObjects Enterprise content, and servers - Maintaining Security , Managing Objects, Managing Servers, Managing Auditing. SIA is the Server Intelligence Agent. Server Intelligence is the underlying server management architecture that simplifies the administration and deployment of BusinessObjects Enterprise servers and services. When you start a SIA you can configure all, some, or none of the servers contained in/managed by the SIA to also be started. All BO servers in a SIA must belong to the same cluster. The SIA maintains server status according to the settings you specify in the CMC. It processes the CMC's requests to start, stop, monitor, and manage all servers on the node, and it also monitors potential problems and automatically restarts servers that have shut down unexpectedly. The SIA ensures optimal performance by continually monitoring server status information, which is stored in the CMS database. When you change a server's settings or add a new server in the CMC, the CMS notifies the SIA, and the SIA performs the task.The SIA is automatically configured during installation, but you can change these default settings through the CCM. CMS (Central Management Server) is one of the servers in Business Objects which runs as a service/process on the OS host but is the vital one. SIA is like a container to hold the servers from Business Objects including CMS in order to make the server admin tasks of BO easier. However there is a separate service/process that runs for SIA as well. Whenever you start/stop SIA, then you intend to start/stop all the servers.The 'ccm.sh' script in '/bobje/' directory lets you stop/start the SIA (apart from 'startservers.sh' and 'stopservers.sh' serving the same purpose of start/stop all the servers at a time) and check the status of the servers as well. You can get the list of operations that could be performed using "ccm.sh help".