BI Scorecard Blog

SAP Business Analytics: Visual, Mobile, and Big Data

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP's business analytics story at last week's Sapphire Conference was all about visual data discovery,  mobile, and big data.

Visual data discovery continues to be one of the hottest segments in business intelligence, as indicated by the buzz around last week's IPO by data-visualization specialist Tableau Software on the NYSE. SAP's big news on this front at Sapphire was the rebranding of its Visual Intelligence product as "Lumira."

The name change is meant to signify a broader solution that will include Lumira Cloud, which is currently in beta and expected to be available mid 2013. Lumira Cloud will allow business analysts to publish and share their visual data discoveries with other cloud users, similar to the way Dropbox users can share files and organize work groups, explained Adam Binnie, SAP's VP of Business Intelligence Solutions. Web-based exploration is one of Lumira's biggest weaknesses, as it's primarily a desktop product. Compared to Tableau, Lumira has more powerful predictive analytics capabilities when deployed with SAP's new Predictive Analysis module, but compared to Tableau, QlikView, SAS Visual Analytics, and TIBCO Spotfire, the product lags in Web-based exploration (see the BI Scorecard side-by-side comparison for more detail). But with Lumira headed into the cloud, running on the SAP Hana in-memory database, SAP recognizes the importance of this market segment and has been aggressively closing the gap.

SAP has been beating the mobile drum for its applications since it acquired Sybase back in 2010. But in the analytics world, its capabilities have been a mixed story. First, there were multiple mobile BI clients, one for Explorer, a lightweight visual data discovery interface, and another for Web Intelligence, the business query module. In addition, the Dashboards module (aka Xcelsius)leveraged Flash technology and could only be rendered as static images on iPad and iPhone devices, although that product improved in a December 2012 release (SAP BusinessObjects Service Pack 5 / SAP Mobile 4.4) that allowed designers to render dashboards in HTML5.

SAP Mobile 5.x, due out mid year, will bring all content types into one mobile client. The interface includes navigation enhancements, similar to the Facebook left-panel interface, that improve navigation and make it easier to find reports by content type. There is currently limited support for content on Android devices that will continue to improve (see SAP's Mobile Roadmap blog.) With this release, I expect SAP to have one of the best mobile capabilities of leading BI vendors, something that was previously only a vision.

SAP seems to be executing on its strategy for visual data discovery and mobile capabilities, but customer adoption seems to be a tale of two worlds. There are the traditional SAP Business Warehouse (BW) customers, who are still heavily entrenched in the BEx spreadsheet-style interface, a legacy product. And then there are the BOBJ 3.x, and BOBJ 4.x. customers. The business analytics product line has gotten so complex that many feel safer simply staying put for now, legacy products or not, mobile-powered or not.

Customer eBay, for example, went through a major SAP ECC (ERP) implementation three years ago and initially leveraged BW with BEx. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, head of Global Financial Systems at ebay concedes that it was painful to get the users to let go of their spreadsheets. With SAP BusinessObjects version 4, users can access InfoCubes directly via Analysis for OLAP or Office (Analysis is the BEx replacement with both a Web-based and Excel-add in), and Dashboards. "We are learning with the users that it is a transition from their beloved Excel to trusted information," Vasquez-Lavado said.

An executive from BEx customer Sigma Aldrich, a life sciences company, noted that there are still some things that BEx handles better than the newer Analysis for Office, such as calculated key figures, time slices, and hierarchies.

Meanwhile, a newly implemented BW customer told me her consulting provider only included BEx in the implementation, so now senior management isn't sure why they need SAP BusinessObjects as well. I can understand migration challenges in mature deployments, but to introduce legacy tools at a new deployment is not in the customer's best interest. SAP should be including SAP BusinessObjects in any new BW deployment, and that this is still not the case reflects ongoing challenges in the company's BI pricing and packaging. Migration of BEx customers to SAP BusinessObjects had also been slowed by delays and quality in the 4.0 release that were resolved in mid 2012 with 4.0 Feature Pack 3.

In contrast to the confusion in the core BI product line, Hana's role is clear: it's about more than business analytics. Maidenform, which uses Hana as its data warehouse platform, reported getting 1.8 billion records from point-of-sale sources, such as Target and Walmart stores, loaded in eight seconds. This allows the company to forecast sales trends weeks in advance as opposed to months out.

Hana will enable eBay to look at hundreds of terabytes of data for signals in currency fluctuations that will allow them to quickly change currency hedges. And utility company CenterPoint Energy is using Hana and BusinessObjects Explorer to monitor demand and track outages, reading 2.2 million smart meters every 15 minutes, for a total of up to 76 million reads per year. "We wouldn't have a big data problem if we didn't have sensors," said CenterPoint CIO Gary Hayes. "The majority of the data may be noise, but we need to manage that noise."

This was my fourth Sapphire conference, since the Business Objects acquisition in 2008, and this year stands clearest in my mind as one of the most exciting ones for Business Analytics. Perhaps it's because the company has moved beyond the three years of integration, beyond last year's apology about SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 issues, to this year, with many more customers live on the latest products. Co-CEO Mill McDermott also gave one of the best keynotes, bringing some very simple faces (and sports star power with NFL Host James Brown, 49ers CEO, and NBA commissioner) to big data. As the Under Armour CEO noted, years ago, a sweat-soaked T-Shirt slowed players down. Now, that T-shirt is capturing biometric data in real-time, making every professional athlete and casual jogger a contributor to the big data explosion.

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SAP Releases In-Memory HANA for OLTP

SAP announced last week  the availability of SAP BusinessSuite powered by Hana, fulfilling a vision it laid out three years ago to leverage the power of in-memory processing not only for analytics but also for transaction processing.

I'll confess that I was one of those skeptics about the OLTP aspect of SAP's in-memory vision. At the time, in-memory was gaining ground in the BI space, with momentum mainly by smaller vendors such as QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, TM1 (acquired by Cognos then IBM). In the mainstream BI camp, SAP had its BW Accelerator, MicroStrategy added in-memory to its OLAP Option, and Microsoft had just released the PowerPivot, in-memory solution for Microsoft Analysis Services, but in 2010, none of these solutions were mainstream. As well, in-memory solutions for OLTP such as TimesTen (acquired by Oracle in 2005) and SolidDB (acquired by IBM in 2007) had little marketshare or momentum.

From the ERP viewpoint, SAP Chairman and cofounder Hasso Plattner claims the need for speed in the ERP system is being driven largely by mobile, where end customer apps demand immediate responses. Here, the use of an in-memory system instead of a relational database has the potential to change business processes as well as lower the cost of ownership. SAP demonstrated the use of BusinessSuite on Hana for material resource planning (MRP) in which a planning analyst must consider existing inventory, supply, and demand. Using a conventional database such processes run in batch, typically overnight depending on the data volumes and required data inputs. With Hana, an MRP forecast can be completed in seconds. If you take the business example of say the current flu epidemic, the value of doing this real-time could potentially solve the problem of insufficient flu medications (in thin supply at our local pharmacy, and yes I got my flu shot but still got the flu!) more immediately.

Customer John Deere has been using Hana for analytics for just over a year. With the success of some proof of concepts, they tested Hana for ERP use as a way of helping their customers and bringing new products to market. Derek Dyer, Direct or Global SAP Services at Deere, says Hana will simplify the IT stack and lower the cost of ownership.

Hasso also argued that the use of Hana as an OLTP database way brings OLTP reporting back to the OLTP. How and where to do operational reporting has been a big point of confusion and frustration for many BI teams and operational report developers, both because of issues in the OLTP and capabilities of the BI tools. Nobody wants to risk running an operational report that cripples data inputs, but when real-time data is needed, you don't want that report to hit potentially stale data in the data warehouse. In this regard, I was glad that Hasso took a pragmatic approach (in contrast to some big data vendors) of conceding that the data warehouse is still necessary for data cleansing and transformation and bringing disparate data sources together.

From the strictly BI perspective, SAP could be more clear about Hana as a platform for BI. Few in the industry realize, for example, that Web Intelligence can access Hana as a data source, as of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Feature Pack 3 (released in June 2012). This did at least get mention at the press conference, but it has rarely been touted in the past as Explorer and Visual Intelligence on Hana have gotten most of the attention. While Visual Intelligence and visual data discovery in general have been the buzz of late, Web Intelligence is the bread and butter of the BI platform, both widely deployed and key to self-service BI. Most often, Web Intelligence queries hit relational data warehouses or BW. Hana as an alternative to a slow data warehouse or data mart seems not be to a key part of SAP’s strategy, unless of course you are already a BW customer.

Also not addressed is how Hana integrates with existing relational databases, because at some point customers may want more granular data or historical data on disk. This seems to be a weakness in Hana compared to Oracle Exalytics, IBM Cognos 10.2, and MicroStrategy all of which who have software advisors to recommend what to leave on disk and what to put in memory. More recently, both QlikView and TIBCO Spotfire latest releases have included drill through from in-memory to in-database options. So, for example, in TIBCO Spotfire, if a user is exploring summary data that has been loaded into Spotfire in-memory and then needs additional details that are stored in the Teradata database, the user can interactively and seamlessly fetch more data as they explore and drill. With Hana, the data seems to be preloaded to memory or not, so accessible or not. Perhaps this is by intention as co-CEO Jim Snabe previously dismissed the need for a hybrid solution, saying they don’t last. I will agree that Hybrid OLAP never gained acceptance, but at the very least, the in-memory advisor approach in competitive tools seems to provide a transition strategy.

For a side-by-side comparison of leading vendor's OLAP and in-memory approaches, see the latest BI Scorecard Product summary.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

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New Book: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference aka The Never Ending Story

I’m pleased to announce that the third edition of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference is now available in print and ebook. The book is intended for BI administrators, developers, and business users who are both long-time and new SAP BusinessObjects customers. Here’s what you need to know about what’s new, what’s covered, and the back story for the book that almost wasn’t.

What's Covered

There are a few chapters on administrative tasks such as securing the data and content, migrating from test to production (Lifecycle Manager), and having multiple developers work on the same universe. Documenting and quality assuring a universe is often an overlooked task, but is a best practice we also include.

Part 3 of the book is updated content for Web Intelligence and re-written by my co-author, Elizabeth Newbould. Elizabeth is a long-time BusinessObjects consultant in Michigan and was the technical editor for the first edition of the book in 2003, as well as the author of the chapter on Web Intelligence Formulas for the second edition of the book. Many of the work flows in Web Intelligence have changed from XI 3.x to 4.0, starting with the Launchpad, which replaced InfoView. From here, users can assemble their own dashboards, interact with existing content or launch various applications. She also covers new capabilities such as accessing BEx queries directly, using the Outline feature (brought in from Desktop Intelligence). There are chapters on the basics of refreshing reports, creating new queries, formatting, formulas, and complex queries. Part 4 of the book is all new content and expanded scope of this edition of the book to include Dashboards and Explorer. Part 4 was a collaborative effort between Clark Duey, a BI director and former consultant in Southern California, Elizabeth, and myself.

The Back Story: Why I Wrote Another Book

Which brings me to the back story of this book. When version 4 was first announced, McGraw Hill asked me if I would update the book. I initially declined, because it consumed too much unpaid time and over time. I also worried it would be perceived that I might be biased toward one vendor. Some of you may know me only through my BusinessObjects expertise, but much of my work involves working with other BI products, consulting on tool selections, publishing the BI Scorecard reports, and teaching for TDWI. Would an updated book jeopardize any perceptions that I was biased towards one vendor? I wrestled with this concern the most. Financially, writing a book is largely a community service effort, so there is clearly no financial bias. It would be easier to write a white paper for a vendor. In the ten years I’ve been an independent analyst, I’ve learned that some vendors will cry foul when things don’t go their way and will guilt me when it suits them. Most importantly, I’ve yet to have a customer complain or express concern. By now, customers know that for deep expertise on BI products, I have to get my hands dirty. Further, McGraw Hill lobbied that books were more important than ever: an updated book would be critical for a large constituent of users and consultants that in an economic down turn, have little money for classroom training. My editor knows I have a strong desire to help people and a desire to serve a community that has led to so many opportunities for me in the BI space. With so many changes in this product release, I could justify that learning the new version to update the book was also necessary evaluation time for BI Scorecard. The clincher was that I could work with two co-authors, so it would be a third of the effort of the earlier books. Easy!

So indeed, we started working on this book in early 2011, writing to the ramp up version of BI 4.0. But then as you know, the first release of version 4.0 was much later and less stable than was expected. It’s hard to write step-by-step instructions or best practices when the software didn’t always work the way it should. By mid summer, we all agreed to stop writing until the product was generally available, and that date ultimately drifted into September 2011. We started writing again, with more stability, but with word that Feature Pack 3 was just around the corner with some substantial changes. Great, so a book that takes a year to write, would have a shelf-life of 6 months!? In February 2012, Feature Pack 3 was released to ramp up so we both re-edited initial chapters and continued to write new content. By then, my co-author Clark had changed jobs and was in the midst of a major ECC and BW upgrade, so had to scale back his work on the dashboard chapters … and what I had hoped would also include a Live Office and Analysis Office Edition chapter. So at various points in the last 18 months, all three of us have contemplated abandoning this project. SAP was unwavering in their support, providing access to all versions of the software, and answering countless questions, some that were bugs and some that were author error. I suspect SAP was equally wary of our questions, complaints, and demands, as we were wary of a moving target and an effort none of us had bargained for. I have sometimes affectionately (and not-so-affectionately) called this book “The Never Ending Story.”

So now that we have a beautiful new edition, we are dancing in the streets and all that pain is long forgotten! Well, not really, but I guess it’s like having a child: give us a few weeks, and all that matters is that we have helped one person, one user, one BI administrator, and indeed it will have all been worth it. For sure, I learned the new version, which is my job, for all BI tools, book or no book. There are some capabilities that I would have liked to cover, but repeating the project manager’s mantra, time, scope, and resources, (we were out of time, and out of resources), I had to let go of some of my wished-for increased scope. Will I ever write another reference book? They say never say never. But I also think that with the growth in the BI market in the ten years since I wrote the first book, publishers are more willing to publish books in this space. It makes it easier for other authors to cover new modules and products, so I hope whatever we missed in this edition, others will continue to fill.

As for my next book, I have in fact already contracted with McGraw Hill to write a sequel to the Successful Business Intelligence book, a tool agnostic book on best practices for greater success. With the rise (and hype) of big data, the sequel will include some case studies on those success and failures. So if you have an experience to share, I hope to hear from you! (either on the record or off).

In the meantime, if you’d like to buy the latest SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference, Amazon seems to have the best prices at the moment, available in both print and ebook. Or if you happen to be at TDWI next week, SAP will be giving away some for free, while supplies last.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP Announces EPM in the Cloud and Free Trial of Visual Intelligence

America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) held its fifth annual user conference in Orlando, Florida last week, with Sanjay Poonen, President of Global Solutions and Head of Mobility, kicking off the week with both a new product announcement and a concession of sorts.

Poonen, who previously led the Business Analytics group, described SAP’s three vectors of innovation as big data, cloud, and mobile. Reflecting the convergence of the three areas of innovation, EPM OnDemand runs in the cloud and using HANA, the now one year-old in-memory appliance, as the underlying database. EPM OnDemand includes three new apps focused on expenses, profit and loss, and capital planning. The apps are all mobilized so plans can be viewed, routed, and approved all directly from an iPad or smartphone.

In the BI space, Poonen recognized the importance of Business Objects to the company’s culture, saying, “In 2007, we had to change the DNA of the company in how we thought about analytics. The Business Objects acquisition was about shaking up the DNA of SAP to shift the focus from the systems of record to systems of engagement.” While CTO Vishal Sikka once claimed SAP BusinessObjects version 4 to be the company’s best release ever, both Poonen and Senior Vice President John Schweitzer conceded that the version 4 release was not what they expected. “We had some work to do to get to the place of promise,” said Schweitzer That place of promise seems to be in the form of Feature Pack 3 (sometimes referred to as service pack 4), released in July this year. In talking to a number of customers at the conference, most had been waiting for Feature Pack 3 and plan to upgrade next year. Early adopters of version 4 say they wish they had waited, mainly due to product stability issues. Early adopters seemed to be in the traditional SAP customer base who embraced the improved support for BW and BEx that version 4.0 brought. Customers who have already deployed Feature Pack 3 cite greater stability and a host of improvements such as collaboration, exploration views, deeper-still SAP integration, HANA and HIVE support, as well as support for Web Intelligence and Crystal content iPad and iPhone for (see this article or a more in-depth review on BI Scorecard).

Visual Intelligence, SAP’s visual data discovery tool for power users first released in May 2012, continued to garner interest and improvement. SAP announced a free 90-day trial, added support for ODBC data sources (the May release only supported HANA), with universe integration due shortly.

One of the highlights of the event was the inaugural developer wars in which teams of developers were given exactly 30 hours to build a live of solution for Second Harvest Food Bank of Florida. Several teams dropped out but teams from Decision First, ATCG, Optimal Solutions, and the co-authors of a just-released book on Web Intelligence remained. A panel of five judges a la Idol style (of which I was a part) cast our votes based on design, analytic capability, ease of maintenance, and fun. It was VERY close, but the final award went to Optimal Solution. Of course the real winner was Second Harvest (also a judge) who walked away with a usable solution to better manage donations and costs to serve the community.

This is the fifth year ASUG has run the BI conference, post SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects. It is one of the best conferences for BI content, customer success stories, and product highlights. But ASUG, SAP, and the long-time BusinessObjects community are still evolving the user group model. One attendee already warned that she won’t ever join ASUG if they have to pay a membership fee, and fortunately, ASUG announced they are extending the “value partnership” which means they are waiving the fee for another year, but only if you don’t use any other SAP products. Founded in 1991, ASUG has a long history with SAP ERP customers, started in an era in which SAP dominated the ERP market and customers wanted a stronger collective influence that they were willing to pay extra for. But this history also has some baggage that the original Business Objects community lacked. SAP treads carefully at this ASUG-run event, and as ASUG protocol dictates, even remaining silent when at least one presenter gave incorrect information about a new product. In this regard, the vendor and the ASUG community alike are still finding their way with a BI community that is more diverse in size, BI maturity, and use of SAP ERP than the original ASUG members.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP Releases Visual Intelligence, Innovates in BI

SAP HANA and a new visual discovery tool Visual Intelligence took center stage at Sapphire this week. But more noteworthy to me is the trend that SAP is once again innovating in BI, not just integrating.

Visual Intelligence is the vendor’s new desktop tool that allows HANA users to visually explore and manipulate data. The tool is positioned for power users, a key difference from the vendor’s lightweight, Web-based visual discovery tool Explorer. Visual Intelligence using HANA as the data source is GA as of this week and is included as part of the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite license. An individual named user license not tied to the BI server is planned but not yet finalized. With HANA in production not-quite a year, that means only a few hundred customers can immediately deploy Visual Intelligence. CTO Dr. Vishal Sikka cited 353 HANA customers, with 145 live HANA deployments.

But this is just the beginning, both because SAP has big plans for HANA and big plans for Visual Intelligence. This week, SAP also announced a developer version of HANA in the Amazon cloud, with over 2000 instances ready immediately. I expect this seeding approach to help HANA’s uptake.

For Visual Intelligence, a subsequent release due in June will support additional data sources such as flat file, free hand SQL (for Web Intelligence users who have been mourning the loss of that feature, I can imagine some resounding cheers!), and Excel data sources. A third release, expected by year end, will bring support for universes, the vendor’s semantic layer. I hope there is support both for the newer .UNX and older .UNV files, as they have done with their new predictive solution. While such dual support may be harder for the vendor to deliver, it certainly helps with customer uptake.

Based on initial demonstrations, Visual Intelligence is strong on its data manipulation capabilities, automatically guessing at measures and dimensions, as well as hierarchies such as time and geography. If the data is not clean, users can perform transformations with no scripting, a point of differentiation from QlikView. The models can be saved back to HANA for other power users to access. I have not yet seen how well Visual Intelligence merges multiple data sources together.

The breadth of visualizations – ranging from standard bar charts to newer tag clouds and trellis charts – seems to compare with some of the best of breed visual discovery tools such as Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire. Lacking, though, is the ability to share discoveries while also preserving the interactivity. A power user, can for example, email an image to another user, but there is not an ability to publish a collection of analyses as a type of dashboard or exploration view that decision-makers can then consume and interact with via an iPad or Web. Expect these improvements to be a theme of the end-of-year release.

While Visual Intelligence took to the main stage, improvements in dashboards and predictive were the themes of one-on-one briefings and booth demos.

Adam Binnie, GM & VP of Business Intelligence Solutions, and Jason Rose, VP of Business Intelligence Marketing, outlined the key drivers for SAP to maintain its BI leadership and improve its capabilities:

1. BI core: SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 and the subsequent Feature Pack 3
2. Creative BI: provide fast time to value for both line of business and IT (Visual Intelligence)
3. Mobile BI: develop first for mobile users and expand BI to untapped users (SAP Mobile & Zen)
4. Extreme Analytics: Big data, real time, predictive (Hana, IQ, Predictive Analysis)
5. Social:  capture the decision, leverage the network. (Streamwork)

Binnie promises all of this Innovation with minimal disruption. That’s a nice vision, of course, but for those customers currently going through a 4.0 migration, I’d suggest reality is a bit more disruptive, particularly for those customers with large Desktop Intelligence deployments. Change is disruptive, like it or not; it’s more a matter of degree of disruption and the quality of the migration utilities.

To elaborate on how SAP is innovating in these five areas, SAP Mobile, for example, was showcased throughout the conference. While SAP executives may be able to claim leadership in mobile as a business application and development platform, the company’s story for Mobile BI is a mosaic, dependent on the device and the BI content. SAP has been caught in the market dynamics of the decline of Flash for animation as well as RIM in the mobile market. Meanwhile, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (aka Xcelsius) relies exclusively on Flash, and what was breakthrough technology in 2005, has become a burden today. In this regard, SAP recently published a statement of direction for its dashboard strategy, with a new product, code-named Zen planned for release this year. Zen will bring HTML5 and long-awaited drill down to dashboards, but initially is for BW content only. SAP has committed to maintaining and enhancing Dashboards (aka Xcelsius) so I was also pleased to see an HTML5 version of Dashboards at the pods, expected in SP5, also later this year. Zen and Dashboards are expected to come together, eventually. One consultant aptly described it the” dashboard quagmire,” a valid comment. However, as I have been critical of SAP’s dashboard product with low scores in the BI Scorecard for years (seemingly going against the grain), I am also glad that SAP now has a plan to address the limitations and seems well on its way.

I previously wrote about SAP’s new Predictive Analysis solution, and in addition, HANA SP4, released last week adds support for R algorithms to run natively.

As I previously wrote about Feature Pack 3, currently in ramp up, support for collaboration via StreamWork integration is noteworthy. Users can directly annotate content and view discussion threads from within the SAP BusinessObjects BI Launchpad. If a user is working within StreamWork, they can also import reports to support a decision process. A new ability to auto update such reports from within StreamWork will be useful say for a weekly planning or strategy meeting. Beyond StreamWork, SAP Hana SP4 also includes support for unstructured data, ideal for analyzing social data.

Last year at this time, customers were waiting for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, late, and three-years since a major release. One year later, there seemed to be improvements on multiple fronts with SAP once again innovating in BI.

And in case you are wondering, no I didn't stay for the Van Halen concert, which I heard was amazing. Seems I only make to Bieber and Swift concerts these days. Now if Barry White were still with us, or Gordon Lightfoot still touring, I'd have to adjust my travel schedule.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP Steps Up Commitment to Predictive Analytics

Last month SAP quietly released a new interface to ramp up: SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis. Ramp up is the vendor’s approach to releasing production software to a limited number of customers. The product is expected to be generally available later this year.

Predictive analytics has become an increasingly important part of the business analytics market and an area in which SAP has lagged behind chief competitors Oracle, IBM, and SAS.  SAP currently OEMs capabilities from SPSS, and with IBM’s acquisition of SPSS in 2009, it seemed only a matter of time before SAP would develop an alternative solution. Competitive and market forces have shaped SAP’s latest endeavor, including the momentum of open source R, in-memory and in-database processing, and the convergence of analytics with business intelligence

Open Source R: R is an open source project initiated by academics in New Zealand in the mid 1990s. It is a statistical language without a graphical user interface. A number of vendors, including SAS, have been adding support for R. For example,  Information Builders WebFOCUS Rstat and  TIBCO Spotfire S+ leverage R. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis provides a graphical user interface to R.

There are two aspects to SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, one is the model development and execution, the other is the visualization to identify patterns in the data. I was impressed by the number of visualizations Predictive Analysis automatically generated to show patterns in the data. To be clear, this is not a visual discovery tool for business users that competes with the likes of Explorer or Tableau. It is a tool for statisticians. But I suspect this integrted visualization capability will prove to be a differentiator.

In-data base processing: Historically, statisticians have worked on offline data files—whether SAS datasets or flat files--to analyze their data and build models. With increasing volumes of data, database and analytic vendors have been pushing more of the processing into the database. SAS for example, was one of the first to push the processing into Teradata in 2008, and now supports  in-database processing with Netezza, EMC Greenplum, DB2, and AsterData . Last month Oracle released Oracle Advanced Analytics that bundles Oracle R Enterprise, providing support for R models to be processed in the Oracle database. With the new SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, processing can be pushed into Hana, the vendor’s new in-memory appliance that includes its own statistical function library.

Mainstream Analytics?: There has never been a rallying cry for mainstream analytics that there has been for business intelligence. Instead, the cry has been for greater integration and ease of consumption of analytic models.  Developing the models remains a task for skilled statisticians. In this regard, some BI vendors have simplified the ease in which a model can be called from a dashboard or report, with the results of the model transparently embedded. An example is a report that displays sales by customer, with a flag to indicate likelihood of churning. MicroStrategy was one of the first to provide such seamless integration but its adoption has been slow.

There has been greater momentum for analytics to be embedded in pre-built analytic applications, and this is an area where SAS solutions are market leaders but in which IBM has been growing.

With the SAP Predictive Analysis, there is nice integration with the BI platform in that the tool can access a universe, either the version 3 format (.UNV) or the new version 4 format (.UNX). This is a similar level of integration in the capabilities SAP currently OEMs from SPSS. However, there currently is no easy way to embed model results in a dashboard or report. SAP expects various analytic applications to take advantage of the new capability over time. For example, the SAP Smart Meter Analytics uses clustering and segmentation algorithms on energy consumption.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is not the vendor’s first entry into the advanced analytics space, but it does seem to be a higher level of commitment to the market than earlier efforts. It’s too early to say if this will have any impact on either SAS’ or SPSS’ share in this space. However, it certainly will improve the capabilities of the analytic applications and will make SAP a natural addition to any customer’s short list new to predictive analysis.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP Commits To Cloud, Beefs Up Mobile And In-Memory Options

At SAP’s seventh annual influencer summit in Boston last week, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe highlighted four areas of SAP innovation: core, mobile, cloud, and in-memory. Interesting to me is that SAP now considers the core to include business intelligence (or to use SAP’s umbrella term, business analytics) as well as its well-established business applications.

Mobile, cloud, and in-memory also cut across both BI and SAP’s business applications.  In mobile, SAP currently has a number of first-mover and competitive advantages. Sybase Unwired gives them a development platform as well as device management. SAP now has 30+ mobile applications. However, in the BI space, its solutions are mixed (check out BI Scorecard's  latest summary scorecard here to see how they stack up), depending on the device and the BI content. For example, mobile interfaces vary depending on whether they're from the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 WebIntelligence, Crystal, Explorer, Dashboards.  Look for this to improve in 2012 (with more detail in this article about what's ahead in SAP BusinessObjects Feature Pack 3).

For cloud, SAP BusinessObjects was one of the first BI platform vendors to have an on-demand strategy. Day two of this summit was largely focused on cloud computing, with SAP emphasizing existing and new cloud applications, including  Sales OnDemand, Sourcing OnDemand , Travel OnDemand and so on.  The  pending acquisition of SuccessFactors will position SAP as the numbertwo SaaS vendor in revenue after SalesForce.com. SuccessFactors provides employee performance management capabilities in the cloud, with 15 million users and a 70% growth rate.

All of this shows SAP is committed to the cloud, but here, BI was like a forgotten step-child. One exec said, “except for Business ByDesign, we didn’t have cloud solutions to sell until this year.” Maybe he misspoke, but it reinforced my perception that BI OnDemand has been more of a check-box than a fully supported BI cloud strategy. In yet another show of stepped-up commitment to cloud, Google announced it will integrate Google Apps with SAP Business ByDesign, the company’s cloud-based business applications suite.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt about SAP’s commitment to in-memory with its Hana technology expected to power not just BI but also business applications. SAP’s vision for in-memory and Hana is to redefine real time. Snabe declared in-memory as the next-generation architecture. He took a subtle dig at Oracle’s (not explicitly naming the vendor) use of "hybrid" technology (relational plus in-memory) in Exalytics, saying hybrids don’t last. 

The benefits of in-memory in terms of real-time, analytic complexity, and performance were backed up by a number of customer testimonials. However, we have to remember that the number of live deployments are probably in the low hundreds. I suspect this is both because of the newness of the product (GA’d in June this year), but also the steep cost for customer to acquire. SAP claims lower long-term ownership costs compared to traditional BW and relational deployments but upfront expenses can be an obstacle. SAP needs to figure out how to bring in-memory to customers with lower budgets. This may be where Hana in the cloud has a role to play or competitors such as QlikTech will continue to expand. Hana will also be the database powering BI On Demand.

One of the most interesting announcements in this area was planned support by third-party vendors including  Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. Tableau has long had a philosophy and architecture of not requiring customers to replicate data into their in-memory engine (an option added in 2010 through Tableau Version 6). So support for SAP’s HANA makes sense. It’s a notable contrast to Oracle, which discontinued its OEM relationship with Tableau earlier this year.  You can preview a demo of Tableau running on  Hana here. Spotfire, in contrast, has typically had an extract-and-load-into-memory approach (with  a drill on demand option), so I will be curious to see how this is implemented. Neither solution is, as of yet, generally available.

Customer FreshDirect provided an interesting view of their journey to self-service BI. They are using SAP's newly released Event Insight to track on-time delivery during the day. Unexpected events like Obama coming to town can certainly disrupt their deliveries throughout New York City. Event Insight alerts them to issues and enables them to quickly add reserve trucks to routes when delays pop up.

FreshDirect routinely monitors BI usage and if someone is not frequently using their license, it gets taken away and allocated to another user. Users author their own reports on everything from delivery performance to number of parking tickets. “If you don’t have access to analytics, you’re going to get squashed by your competition, ” says Brandon Arbiter, FreshDirect's manager of business intelligence.

It was a big picture kind of summit, so I had to reflect on where SAP has been in BI and where it’s going. Executive VP of Business Analytics Sanjay Poonen committed to being best of breed in BI. I couldn’t help recall SAP’s stance prior to the BusinessObjects acquisition, striving only to be "good enough." It’s better for customers and the industry that they are now pursuing excellence.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

SAP BusinessObjects Previews Next BI Release at ASUG Conference

Many SAP BusinessObjects customers are still sizing up the 4.0 release of the vendor's business intelligence suite, just released last month. At last week's ASUG (Americas SAP User Group) conference in Florida, Steve Lucas, SAP's senior vice president and general manager business analytics, gave those customers more to think about, detailing a BI 4.0 Feature Pack 3 upgrade due out in the first half of 2012.

The biggest improvements in Feature Pack 3 (formerly known as 4.1) will include advances in mobile BI, analytic views, and collaborative BI by way of SAP's Streamwork tool. Here's a peek inside those expected upgrades along with a summary of the key new capabilities of last month's big 4.0 release.

• Mobility, mobility, mobility: With SAP's acquisition of Sybase, the vendor has access to technology that most other BI vendors lack. One of the biggest concerns with mobility is security. With Feature Pack 3, SAP BusinessObjects products will be prewired with Afaria, security controls from the Sybase Unwired platform that support mobile device management capabilities such as authentication and remote wipe. 

The feature pack will also bring significant improvement to the SAP BusinessObjects native iPad apps in terms of interactivity and user experience. However, looking at some of the offerings from partner vendors exhibiting at ASUG, the solutions from RoamBI, Antivia, and  Exxova were pretty compelling, and they are available today. Right now, SAP BusinessObjects' mobile story is a complicated puzzle depending on the device and content. Dashboards, for example, rely on Flash, which is not supported by Apple on the iPad. Content, security capabilities, and device support all seem to improve in the next release.

• Analytic Views: Analytics views are an extension of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, the combination search and basic visual discovery tool. With analytic views, users can create individual visualizations and save them into a briefing book. Explorer will also be usable offline in the next release.
• Collaborative BI: SAP Streamwork is SAP's collaboration tool. Feature Pack 3 will provide better integration with BI content. While viewing a report, for example, someone can initiate a threaded discussion or action within Streamwork.

You can watch the keynotes here, after registering. The 4.0 release did get some attention during ASUG's keynotes and, certainly, in the track sessions. Herein lies the problem with a later-than-expected release: all the excitement around 4.0 was largely experienced around the launch last February. Lucas cited the product's ramp up as one of the most successful ever, with 400 live deployments and 4,000 downloads (though few customers with live 4.0 deployments presented at ASUG, so I'd love to hear from you!).

Given that 4.0 only reached general availability in September, many customers are still trying to understand this version. Do they now wait for Feature Pack 3 or immediately implement 4.0? SAP is recommending customers upgrade now, but in my opinion, they should decide their upgrade plan based on which functionality is most important. (see the SAP blog for release plan details). There are dozens of improvements in 4.0 but the biggest ones are:

• Multisource universes: An administrator can build a universe (the vendor's term for a data model) drawing on multiple relational data sources. This has been a big competitive weakness in SAP BusinessObjects when compared to Oracle, IBM Cognos, and MicroStrategy. I've tested this capability in 4.0 and feel that other products still seem to have a more robust approach. Nonetheless, this is still a big improvement for SAP BusinessObjects customers.
• Direct SAP BICS Connectivity: The 4.0 release lets SAP Business Warehouse (BW) customers access BEx queries directly via the BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Services) layer, a proprietary communication interface for BW, using either Web Intelligence, Dashboard Designer, or Crystal Reports. Going through the BICS layer provides better performance than the APIs previously used. There had been talk of SAP BW being supported as a data source in the universe, but that does not appear to be the case. (I have received conflicting information from SAP on this point, so I'm awaiting clarification.)
• Dashboard Improvements: Xcelsius has been rebranded as Dashboards in 4.0. In earlier releases, designers had to use Live Office or Query as a Web Service to bring data into the design tool. Now designers can invoke the query panel directly from the dashboard designer, streamlining the data flows and design process. The vendor has made additional performance improvements as well, with a separate server process to cache results.

I have discussed other improvements in 4.0 in previous blogs or for BI Scorecard subscribers here.

Beyond the product roadmap, an ongoing discussion among BusinessObjects customers is the role of ASUG and regional user groups: should they join ASUG or not. ASUG was formed 20 years ago by SAP applications customers. When SAP acquired Business Objects, it also gained a number of self-running user groups. It seemed a natural evolution for those user groups to fold into ASUG. But the customer bases are different, and it's a tough sell for previously autonomous groups to now be told there is an additional layer of communication with the vendor. The idea behind ASUG is to bring influence in numbers--organized numbers--but also to provide content in the form of mentors, webinars, training, and knowledge bases.  

Some user groups have joined ASUG. Others have not. The idea of paying for membershipseems to go against the grain. Membership to ASUG for BusinessObjects customers is currently free, a temporary gesture that has been extended for another year. User groups worry that independent contractors and smaller companies will ultimately be disenfranchised when the fee waivers end. It was noteworthy that roughly 80% of the 1,200 attendees at this year's conference were not SAP customers before the acquisition, dispelling concerns that the ASUG group is only focused on SAP applications customers.

That ASUG even holds a BusinessObjects conference is a benefit to members and non members alike. While BI is a big part of SAP's Sapphire conference, it is but one of many tracks. Sapphire itself can be rather overwhelming, particularly for a customer who only buys BI from SAP.

One session that was packed at ASUG was a panel on using social media for influence and leadership, and that I was honored to participate on. BusinessObjects Board  Forum founder Dave Rathbun, SAP executive Timo Elliott, WNBA star and Olympiad Lisa Leslie, public relations expert Mary Erangey, and analyst Bruce Richardson were my fellow panelists. Everyone had some useful recommendations, and sometimes humorous experiences with Twitter and blogging.

Elliott suggested being quotable without "feeding the trolls." In other words, don't spew just the negative tweets that grab attention but not necessarily credibility or value. I liked Leslie's  advice to remember we are always a role model and that we wear multiple hats: she can just as soon chat up Charles Barclay as pep talk new moms.  

With that advice, I have added a new twitter handle. If you want to follow my BI tweets, follow me on @BIScorecard. If you are interested in juggling work and motherhood tweets (in a largely man's world!), follow @BI_Lady.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Delayed

At Sapphire this year, CTO Vishal Sikka claimed that version 4.0 is the “best release ever of Business Objects.” The GA was initially thought to be ahead of Sapphire in May, then pushed out to June, and now August. The delay was announced in a company blog post last week.

While the delay in the BI product is the most important, two other products in the 4.0 launch have become generally available. The Data Services module and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office, both GA’d last week. SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office is a premium alternative for the well-established BEx Excel interface. BEx continues to be supported, though.

SAP BusinessObjects launched the next release of their flagship product earlier this year in February in New York and cities around the world. It is a product several years in development and one that promises innovation for both the SAP BW customer base, but for the non SAP ERP customers as well. SAP customers have been waiting for performance improvements and better integration with BW. Long-time Business Objects customers have most been waiting for data federation, better graphing, workflow, and a more scalable dashboard solution.

The product officially went into ramp up last December. Ramp up is SAP’s approach to releasing new software versions in which a limited number of customers deploy production quality software. The software has to be deployed in production, not just in labs or downloaded for evaluation purposes. SAP will make the software generally available (GA) to all customers once certain KPIs have been reached, related to bug resolution and number of customers deployed.

Customer reaction to the delay has been decidedly mixed. Nobody wants to deploy software that isn’t stable, and BusinessObjects customers have clear memories of version 6 (2003) and version 4 before that (1996), releases that were not stable. (In case you are wondering how the vendor got back to a version 4, 15 years later after the original 4.0 was released:  Version 11 of the product was renamed XI to also stand for eXtreme Insight. The new numbering was adopted when the BusinessObjects BI platform took on the Crystal Enterprise architecture which would have been Crystal Enterprise  version 11. So the product was renumbered, XI Release 1, Release 2, and so on. The XI has been dropped from the branding, but in theory it is XI Release 4.)

In this regard, a delay to ensure software quality is something SAP customers have come to expect. However, one customer complained that the repeated delays have impacted their training and deployment plans that most likely will now be pushed into 2012. Customers who were planning on purchasing BI 4.0 likewise have to defer their plans, or decide to purchase and deploy on XI 3.1, then upgrade later.  SAP’s next earning call at the end of July will be the biggest indicator of how big a deal this delay has been.  The frustration then is about communication and managing expectations, a page all vendors and internal BI teams should take heed from. SAP has been talking about the 4.0 release since it completed its acquisition of Business Objects in early 2008. By those roadmap accounts, the GA is a year later than expected. Customers tend to look at roadmaps with a wary eye: too much theory, too many moving parts; time will tell. However, much of the hype for 4.0 began bubbling at the ASUG conference last October 2010, then the world wide launch in February 2011. No wonder, then, that it got little fanfare at Sapphire this year, as the product still wasn’t ready.

A few months delay in the software industry is not that big a deal, particularly as the installed base and complexity of these products has grown. More worrying to me is the number of key departures from the SAP BI product team (Marge Breya, Dave Weisbeck, and the latest George Mathew). I could make a similar criticism about loss of BI personnel at Microsoft, but not of IBM Cognos or Oracle. As the SAP BusinessObjects departures are in the middle of a major product release, it cannot be good for either customers or for the vendor. SAP says the departures have had no impact on the product release and other BI veterans have shifted responsibilities (Sanjay Poonen, Steve Lucas and Adam Binnie).

You tell me: has your BI deployment or buying been effected by this delay or are such delays par for the course?

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP’s In-Memory HANA Showcased at Sapphire

At SAP’s Sapphire conference this week, Business Analytics boasted its own “campus”, a large portion of the exhibit hall in a prime location near the entrance. “Business analytics” is SAP’s umbrella term that includes data warehousing, EIM, performance management, and business intelligence. Business Analytics and did not get such prominent positioning in previous years. From my BI perspective, it’s a welcome contrast to other mega conferences; at Oracle it’s a matter of finding the right hotel and Microsoft didn’t even have a BI-focused conference this year.

SAP HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance), an innovation that combines in-memory processing and a columnar database on an appliance, took center stage in multiple keynotes. What was just an idea at last year’s conference, was released to rampup in December 2010. Customer testimonials were central to CTO Vishal Sikka’s keynote, with companies from around the world and across industries touting its value, ease of deployment, and low cost of ownership. Tom Greene CIO of Colgate-Palmolive cited tremendous savings in time with queries going from 77 minutes in to 13 seconds. Bosch-Siemens describes themselves as a data-driven enterprise that makes decisions on facts. The home appliance manufacturer is using HANA to do profitability by customer and product; a level of analysis that would have taken days before now takes seconds. Nestle, who sells over 1 billion consumer products per day, described how HANA lets them analyze the granular details, not just the summary aggregates they were previously limited to in BW. The HANA implementation took only three weeks and brought 2000 times performance improvement. The list went on.

While the keynotes brought the excitement, clarification around SAP’s product positioning came in track sessions, micro forums, and one-on-one sessions.  Some clarifications in positioning SAP’s data warehouse products:

• While there have been rumors of its demise, SAP BW will continue as a data warehouse solution for SAP ERP customers. BW is considered to be better suited for financial consolidations and historical aggregates.
• HANA is for real-time, granular data, initially for SAP ERP customers this year, with expansion beyond that customer segment next year. HANA could be used as the database engine for SAP BW, posing a clear threat to a market currently dominated by Oracle. (While IBM would stand to lose database share as well, IBM is one of the HANA hardware providers.)
• Sybase IQ supports larger data volumes than HANA, with a lower price point, and from any source system. Sybase IQ is also more proven, with 3000 installations over years, compared to a handful of HANA customers. While a lower acquisition cost would make sense for a software-only versus appliance solution, I wish SAP would publish a price list (like Oracle does!) as Dr. Shikka cited HANA running on everything from a Mac mini at the low end to a blade server with 2 TB of RAM and 80 cores at the high end.

Although not discussed at Sapphire, the other potential beneficiaries of HANA are third-party BI vendors and those customers. HANA supports both SQL and MDX, simplifying access by third-party tools such as IBM Cognos, Oracle BI EE, and MicroStrategy who currently are forced to rely on BW’s BAPI interface which can be slow.  Not surprisingly, competitive BI vendors were not invited to participate in rampup, but IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, and Oracle all say they will be quickly verifying support once the product becomes generally available.  

While in-memory and real-time grabbed most of the buzz at Sapphire, the two other innovations CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe described as SAP’s top priorities are mobility and collaboration. Mobility for SAP is far beyond the traditional mobile BI initiatives, but instead, will include processes and sensors, powered largely by capabilities from Sybase. Collaboration is a new breed of applications for SAP, focusing on people interactions rather than its historical process focus. Sales OnDemand is one of the first applications reflecting this shift, but Stream Work will be central to this area of development.

SAP Business Objects 4.0 did get mention in the key notes, but that’s about it. With 100 customers in ramp up, the product is expected to become generally available in June.  Sikka claimed that version 4.0 is the “best release ever of Business Objects”, describing founder Bernard Liautaud as complementing SAP on its improvements. Sikka also declared that industry analysts are also calling it the “best BI product,” but went on to rephrase “the largest market share” (a big difference from best product but a nuance conveniently lost in the Twitter world). I suspect you won’t get any industry analysts backing up Sikka’s initial claim without qualifications, although the market share claim is correct.

I would have liked more (any, in fact) SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 testimonials and ideally from customers who have gone through an upgrade.  Until then, I remain in the skeptic’s corner that customers will rush to embrace this new version as taking advantage of many of the most sought-after improvements (described in this blog about the launch) brings a learning curve in design and administration. I’m still assessing just how steep that curve is.

On a side-note, I bumped into specialty vendor Roambi  who just released a cool new product Roambi Flow. Roambi Flow lets business users publish magazine-style reports that can include their own charts, articles, video all from an iPad. In a world of mega BI vendors, this startup is certainly differentiating itself and innovating in exciting ways. 

Have you taken the 2011 Successful BI Survey yet? There’s still time to rate your BI adoption, success, and vendor usage.  You’ll receive summary highlights, enabling you to compare your company’s BI impact with the market overall.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard