At the recent SAP Run Better Tour in New York City, SAP launched the long-awaited 4.0 releases of its SAP BusinessObjects (BOBJ) business ntelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) solutions. Freya Purnell reports.
Designed to respond to increasing globalisation and the growth in mobile technology and social network usage, the new releases are the result of three years of software development, and aim to better equip organisations to assess and act decisively on the torrent of information generated within and outside their businesses.
The solutions
Unified on a common infrastructure, helping to reduce IT landscape complexity and speed deployment times, and with a friendly user interface oriented towards self-service, the new BI and EIM releases bring together a range of the technology innovations SAP has been touting as the future of analytics:
• Real-time processing through in-memory computing, optimised for use on SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) software;
• Access from mobile devices to information anywhere, capitalising on the capabilities of the Sybase Unwired Platform;
• Combining structured and unstructured information to blend business and social data, through a new multi-source, multi-dimensional semantic layer and a new common authoring experience; and
• Providing organisations with a choice of deployment models that best fits their needs and which will reduce the total cost of ownership.
The solution set includes new versions of SAP Crystal Reports, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence, in addition to the SAP StreamWork application. Integration with SAP enterprise performance management (EPM) and governance, risk and compliance solutions has also been enabled to facilitate seamless visibility of performance and risk.
Dr Vishal Sikka, executive board member, technology and innovation, SAP AG, said this release of the BOBJ solutions had been on the drawing board since the acquisition of Business Objects. “This product is a perfect example of what the combination of these two companies has been about.
“By combining the beauty and the consistency – bringing in the beautiful user experience for which SAP BusinessObjects software was always famous, the elegant simplicity together with the strength of SAP software, integrated identity management, SAP NetWeaver Application Server and integrated lifecycle management – we have wonderful products to share with our customers. And now with SAP HANA, we also bring the ability to analyse massive amounts of data in real time.” Steve Lucas, SAP EVP and GM, SAP BusinessObjects division, said the 4.0 releases deliver on the SAP analytics roadmap and vision through tight integration and a common look and feel.
“Over the past three years, we have listened closely to our customers and worked to bring more unity across all our SAP BusinessObjects solutions… We believe that by bringing people powerful, lightning-fast business analytics software in the most intuitive experience possible, they can now easily
access unprecedented amounts of information to make better decisions.”
Among the partners involved in the SAP Ramp-Up program for the 4.0 releases were Accenture, Atos Origin, Capgemini, cundus AG, Deloitte, HP, Logica, Siemens IT Solutions and Services and Teradata.
The feedback
Carl W. Olofson, research vice-president, application development and deployment, IDC, spoke in favour of the new solutions, saying historically companies have dealt with BI on a project by project basis and have lacked the ability to bring the data together, but that the new SAP solutions provide benefits around data trustworthiness and process timeliness. “All of these components should provide the basis for an information environment that is nimble and responsive,” he said.
Upon the launch, SAP already had reference customers Lionsgate Entertainment Corp, an independent entertainment studio, and Hilti, a technology provider to the global construction industry, ready to talk about their experiences with the 4.0 releases. Lionsgate evecutive vice president and chief information officer, Leo Collins, said one of the most exciting aspects of the new releases was the ability to use tools like the iPad and smartphones to drive sales.
“We’ve implemented [SAP NetWeaver] BW and [SAP NetWeaver] BW Accelerator – systems that pull data directly out of the core financial systems…. We do have phenomenal amounts of data. We know how every motion picture has done in every theatre, we know all of the expenses at a very granular level, and these new tools we’re getting from SAP allow us to have better revenue streams and better control of costs.”
Similarly, being able to access enormous amounts of customer data in real-time and respond faster to customers was what Christian Ritte, head of PCC, finance, HR and reporting, Hilti, was looking for. After finishing the pilot phase of SAP HANA, Hilti plans to unite this with the 4.0 releases for easy-to-use reporting. “Complexity can only be addressed by providing better visualisation and we think that with SAP BusinessObjects [software] we can really go a step ahead,” said Ritte.
Which version of BW should I aim for?
“For those customers who are still on BW version 3.5 (and older), you don’t need to be told that you have been out of standard support since March last year. All customers should be aiming for the strategic BW 7.01 release. You will find it increasingly difficult to remain on the long term BW roadmap unless you opt for a Unicode instance,” de Thomasis says.
Which version of BWA should I aim for?
“For those who have already made the investment in BWA technology, you need to be on BWA 7.0. The next version, BWA 7.2, is required for BW 7.3. If you are in the process of deploying the BWA, you should jump directly to BWA 7.2. The BWA 7.2 will run in full BWA 7.2 mode if you pair it with a BW 7.3 system and quite happily run in BWA 7.0 mode if you pair it with a BW 7.01 system.”
How do I get onto the in-memory roadmap?
“In its first iteration, HANA 1.0 is aimed at the Operational and Agile Data Marts. This makes HANA 1.0 a good match for highly volatile data which changes frequently or historical data which can be supplemented with external data and modelled on the fly. “Customers can opt for a side-by-side HANA 1.0 deployment for the BW landscape provided they are on BW 7.3 and BWA 7.2. The BWA will evolve into HANA 1.0 – in fact, HANA 1.0 is able to be run in BWA mode.
“The benefits of deploying HANA 1.0 in an existing BW landscape include a large performance boost courtesy of the improved compression and processing power of the in-memory computing engine, as well as the capability to build customer-specific acceleration scenarios taking data from multiple sources.”
What’s next on the HANA roadmap?
“In its next iteration, HANA 1.5 will be aimed at Architected Data Marts. Subsequent releases of BW 7.3 will begin to unlock HANA 1.5 specific capabilities such as online data store activation in real time. “The most exciting prospect of HANA 1.5 is the ability to move BW data out of the existing database and run it directly from the appliance. With the compression rates offered, increased performance and reduced database
licensing costs, this makes HANA 1.5 quite an interesting value proposition.”
Key elements of the 4.0 releases include:
• SAP BusinessObjects Data Services software for the consolidation and integration of data services into any BI or application environment.
• SAP BusinessObjects Information Steward, which gives users the ability to analyse and rate data sources and share KPI scorecards.
• SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight to help users understand the impact of business events such as market fluctuations, through scenario analysis and
historical comparison.
• SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence for self-service, flexible access to trusted information.
Tony gives a full rundown on this topic in his blog entry on the SAP developer Network, which you can find here www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/23740 .
This article was first published in Inside SAP March/April 2011.
