BI Scorecard Blog

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

 

SAP BusinessObjects launches BI 4.0 in New York

At the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 launch in New York yesterday, GM for Business Analytics Steve Lucas declared, “This release doesn’t just level playing field, it takes it up several notches. We are far and away the leader in many areas.”

The list of improvements in this release was a dizzying array of enhancements and new capabilities. SAP emphasized three themes to this release:  real-time, easy, and optimized.

I wrote about the BI 4.0 release in this blog and BI Scorecard® highlight report after it was previewed at ASUG last fall.  The BI 4.0 release is now in ramp up, a production-code version that is used by a pre-approved list of 30 customers. SAP expects the product to be generally available in the first half of the year, hinting that the May Sapphire conference would be an ideal deadline.

Some of the biggest improvements in BI 4.0 include multi-source universes, mobile, in-memory, and SAP integration.  Multiple data sources at the universe level has been a long-awaited improvement. Earlier versions of the product gave users different approaches to handling multiple data sources:  at the report level users could merge data from multiple data sources, but it is a manual, somewhat tedious process reserved for advanced report authors.  Data Federator was an optional module that had limited adoption and required an extra server license. Data federation in 4.0 is included in the base license (a point of difference with MicroStrategy). For usability, SAP nicely highlights the different data sources in the Information Design Tool (IDT), a replacement to the universe Designer.

The mobile demos were equally impressive and exciting. SAP showed WebI reports and Xcelsius Flash-based dashboards (Xcelsius is renamed just Dashboards in 4.0), on RIM’s new, not-yet-released tablet device, the BlackBerry PlayBook. That the Playbook supports Flash natively has to be the product’s biggest differentiator over the Apple iPad (…as well as corporate security, smaller size, camera, synching with smartphone, printing … but I won’t digress). WebI on the iPad was also demonstrated.  SAP BusinessObjects previously only supported Explorer content on the iPad. This reflects an important point to all customers – that you need to know both what content and which devices your BI vendor supports.

Ramp-up customer Hilti (maker of power drills) talked about their experience with HANA, SAP’s new in-memory analytic appliance that also leverages a columnar data store. Queries that the customer used to run in two to three hours now run in two to three seconds.  The data volumes were not that big – 9 million customer records. But it’s the complexity of customer segmentation and that the queries were running directly in the transactional source system that made for the slow queries. Christian Ritter, head of Reporting and Global IT at Hilti, explained that with HANA, they would skip building a data warehouse altogether. Data is replicated in near real time from the SAP transaction systems into HANA.

Oddly enough, it was the SAP integration that got little attention at the actual launch event, as the vendor continues to try to remain agnostic for and sensitive to non SAP business app customers. The company had pre-briefed me on what’s new here, the main headline being improved performance between BW and the SAP BusinessObjects client tools.  Because the client tools now access content through the BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Services) layer, a proprietary communication layer that SAP’s Excel interface, BEx, also uses to communicate with BW. Xcelsius leveraged BICS connectivity last year, but now in BI 4.0, all the traditional BusinessObjects client tools do as well including Web Intelligence. This change reportedly boosts performance by a factor of 4 and addresses one of the biggest complaints with the SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 integration kit. Beyond the performance improvement, the other big benefits are that customers don’t have to first create a universe on top of a BEx query or BW InfoCube; the BEx query can be accessed directly in WebI. The big question will be: what does this mean for third-party BI vendors who support BW and for customers who use third party BI tools? If you are an SAP customer with a custom data warehouse, the playing field is still level. If you’re on BW, SAP BusinessObjects now has a leg up.

Two of my biggest questions about BI 4.0, though, remained unanswered (or answered but vaguely, so I am unconvinced). One question was how easy was the upgrade (and executives are clear to say it’s an upgrade, not a migration)? None of the ramp up customers at the event had evaluated the upgrade utilities. The other question is about the impact of the 4.0 server running only on 64-bit OSs.  While many corporations use new hardware and OSs in their data centers, infrastructure for BI application servers seems to still be 32-bit (a TechTarget survey released in the fall, cites 83% which sounds high to me). Bottom line is: if your current BusinessObjects deployment is on older hardware, you need to plan for an upgrade. And if you have server-based licensing that counts cores, expect to have to re-negotiate.

But you tell me: is everyone’s BI server on 64-bit already? Am I more concerned about this than I need to be?

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP BusinessObjects Launches 4.0 at ASUG

Last week I attended the ASUG (America’s SAP User Group) Business Objects user conference in Orlando.  Besides wanting to check out the view of BI from the ASUG perspective, I also wanted to hear about BusinessObjects 4.0. While SAP had briefed me late last year under NDA, the ASUG conference marked the world wide customer debut of the company’s next generation business intelligence capabilities.

Many of the enhancements are long-awaited, in particular data federation at the “universe” level (renamed business layer in 4.0). Xcelsius customers will love direct connectivity to a universe, no longer having to design dashboards in Excel or deal with Query as a Web Service. The company has been smart to support dual universe versions via the new platform, making the upgrade more of a transition than a sudden switch over.  However, that BusinessObjects 4.0 will only run on 64-bit means customers need to plan ahead for server upgrades. While the industry has been moving to 64-bit platforms for greater scalability, few customers currently claim it as a standard.  The new release expects to go into “ramp up“ (release quality but only available to a few customers) this fall with general availability in the first half of next year.

I couldn’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia as this was the new face of what once was known as the Business Objects User Conference, a meeting I first attended in 1994.

When SAP acquired Business Objects in 2008, it acquired a customer base that had self- initiated, local user groups. It also had one of the most thorough, user-run forums: BOB. Users actively supported each other, for free. ASUG, on the other hand, was customer-run but charged its members an annual membership fee. Business Objects customers griped that that’s what they pay the vendor support fees for. Meanwhile, SAP BusinessObjects said its user conference would be folded into Sapphire. But this left some long-time non SAP ERP, Business Objects customers somewhat lost in the shuffle. ASUG has gradually been transitioning the independent user groups, BOB, and the user-driven conference. Wanting to make this transition to ASUG successful, ASUG has made membership for SAP Business Objects customers free through next year.

As this was the first time I attended the ASUG version of the conference, I was impressed. The quality of the customer presentations was excellent. Pepsi talked about the challenges of a 26,000 user deployment. Long-time BOB leader Dave Rathbun was rightfully presented a service award. But in New York/ New Jersey, longtime BONYMAUG leader Chris Sieverts seemed to move on all too quietly. (Sieverts will still be involved in the new BONYMAUG / ASUG New York chapter but not as the president). Numerous ASUG Influence sessions gave customers a stronger voice for what they want in future product versions.

BI Scorecard customers can access more details on Business Objects 4.0 in an upcoming report.

Regards,

Cindi Howson

BI Scorecard

 

SAP's New Analytic Applications

SAP is already the leading analytic applications vendor, according to IDC, so what is the big deal behind this week’s announcement?

Much of what SAP has historically delivered has focused only on data stored in the SAP systems and then using SAP front end technologies, whether the BW warehouse or Visual Composer, for example. The solutions announced this week take advantage of the BusinessObjects tools, Explorer, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius.  Most importantly, Data Federator is included in the architecture, enabling customers to use much of their existing infrastructure. Non SAP ERP customers can use these new apps, because they are no longer reliant on BW as a data source. The data can reside in BW, a custom data warehouse, or the transaction system. SAP says this abstraction layer will allow for a more flexible solution. Unlike most other analytic applications on the market, SAP is not requiring a physical data model. To Kimball Group’s Margy Ross’s article in Intelligent Enterprise this week, one of the problems with analytic applications is lack of flexibility, that the pre-built data models become data silos. The SAP BusinessObjects abstraction layer partially addresses the concerns raised in her article, because it doesn’t require a precise physical model. SAP says that the abstraction layer will allow a business to more easily customize the analytic app.

The vendor also emphasized that these solutions were co-developed with their customers. While this clearly results in a customer-focused solution, I can’t quite get my mind around how and why a customer such as Levi’s or McCain would work on applications that SAP can then turn around to sell to a customer’s competitor.

The final area of differentiation is that these applications will include predictive analytics as appropriate. Initially, it sounds like this aspect to the apps are through service offerings, but that overtime, it will be part of the applications.

The release this week further draws the industry battle lines with SAP’s competitors:

• Oracle, whose analytic applications have been growing rapidly but primarily serve Oracle ERP customers.
• SAS whose industry-focused solutions are source system agnostic and account for a large portion of SAS’s revenues.
• IBM Cognos who has been gradually expanding its prebuilt analytic applications and industry blue prints.

For a short overview of leading BI vendor’s approach to analytic applications, download the free BI Scorecard Market Segments report.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

SAP & In Memory - Take 3

It has taken multiple briefings, presentations, and well, time, for SAP to convince me that their just-announced in-memory solutions will be game changing. My ‘ah ha’ moment came only after seeing a prototype.

As I wrote in this feature last year on in-memory, speed of thought analysis is the way people want to work. The technology is not new, and SAP first jumped into the in-memory fray three years ago with its BW Accelerator appliance. Others, such as IBM Cognos TM1, TIBCO Spotfire, and QlikTech QlikView have been around longer.

So what’s the big deal about SAP’s new Business Analytic Engine (BAE)? First, they’ve announced that it is in development. Production product is expected within a year, although CTO Vishal Sikka suggested by by the end of this year. Assessing differentiators of an in-development product is a challenge, but here are a few:

· BAE encompasses transactional and analytic data. No other product or vendor does this. In the keynote, founder and chairman Dr. Hasso Plattner started off viewing a monthly sales chart in SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (product review here). Sales projection looked lower than target.  In contacting the production manager, the production manager could review open orders from within SAP’s Business byDesign; the transaction system was working off the same in-memory database as SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. Once the confirmed date was updated in the transaction system, the change was immediately apparent in Explorer (demoed, by the way, on an iPad.  Integrating the operational and analytic processes opens up new applications. When I visited the Labs at Sapphire, I also saw a prototype of a customer segmentation application. The segmentation was done so intuitively and quickly, that the whole segmentation process was more iterative than normally possible. A de-duplication of records, that typically takes hours, took seconds.

· The new BAE does not require BW, unlike BW Accelerator (BWA). SAP’s previous in-memory approach only benefited customers who had committed to BW. In this regard, there is greater flexibility than with BWA, because star schemas do not have to be built first. The new engine promises to benefit existing Business Objects customers.

· The BAE is an appliance; most other in-memory approaches on the market are software-only. HP was highlighted as an initial partner co-developing the solution, but IBM was also mentioned in a subsequent interview. IBM is a hardware partner for the BWA appliance.

· The modeling of the in-memory model will be incorporated with the current business meta data layer or universe; so it sounds like both business users and DBAs will have modeling capabilities that today are often separate. More complex calculations can be done in memory.

·  The database will be accessible via SQL, MDX or Excel, so it is not disruptive to the application layer or front-ends. I still have to see this still to believe it.

· Planning applications will leverage the in-memory engine bringing more flexibility and allowing for more iterations than currently possible. In theory, this would also provides more integration between BI and planning than other vendor solutions.

Beyond in-memory, cloud computing and mobile also took center stage.

While these were some of the headlines, I have to mention General Colin Powell’s key note, both amusing and inspiring. I am still picturing him getting patted down by TSA, having paid cash for his airfare, shown up late, and post Secretary of State. He spoke of his work in trying to improve high school graduate rates and reminded us, “It doesn’t matter where you start. What counts is where you end up and what you do in between.”

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

From Vision to Reality at SAP NetWeaver BI Conference

Last week, I was at the SAP Insider conference that focuses on business intelligence. As I’ve written before, these conferences are a little different from other user conferences in that they are run by a separate media company instead of by the vendor or a user group. So as I felt once before in attending one of these, there is a big disconnect between SAP BusinessObjects' lofty vision and customer reality.

SAP BusinessObjects executives Franz Aman and Dave Weisbeck kicked off the event with a keynote that demonstrated the potential BI can bring. They showcased one customer Valero Energy who has been able to save 200 million dollars in the first year of their BI program.  Using dashboards to show people the impact of their business decisions was a key aspect of the deployment.

While many users like the idea of a simple, Google-like interface to BI and some vendors have responded with recent innovations, Aman declared, “Search will be the exception, not the rule. If you have to go to a search box, we’ve failed you.”  This is a good vision – all the data a user needs at their finger tips, personalized, and optimally presented at the start of each day, or embedded within each task. But I think we are years away from that. In the meantime, many users would settle for a search box, as long as the searchable content is relevant, complete, and inexpensive to implement.

The keynote included a demo of the just- released StreamWork (previously known as 12Sprints and project Constellation). This is a new category of tool that combines collaboration and decision making. I will clearly be more excited about it when it integrates BI data with the decision-making process, an enhancement planned for release later this year. You can try out StreamWork here.  (If you sign up and let me know your email address, I can invite you to a test decision-making activity I created on BI standardization.)

In talking to customers and attending presentations, though, the reality is that very few of the SAP NetWeaver BI customers will be taking advantage of these innovations any time soon. To use BW Accelerator and Explorer (see an in-depth product review here), customers need to be on the latest BW release (7.0  EHP1, SP5). The same applies to direct BW-Xcelsius integration released several months ago. As one customer described, upgrading the entire data warehouse platform was a six-month process they completed in July, and that was just to get to 7.0 SP3 (not enough for Explorer or Xcelsius). They don’t have plans to do another upgrade any time soon.

Given how slowly SAP customers are upgrading, one of the best things SAP BusinessObjects has planned is for the next release of SAP BusinessObjects XI to allow the universe or next generation semantic layer to leverage existing BEx queries. This seems like a smart migration strategy.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard