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
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