By Anne Widjaja
SAP has announced two new business intelligence innovations: the Feature Pack 3 for the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions and the 1.0.1 release of SAP Visual Intelligence software, equipped with powerful analytics tools.
The announcement was made at the SAP Analytics Forum North America earlier this week.
The Feature Pack 3 for the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions, which includes SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge edition software, has new capabilities in the following areas:
• Mobile: Direct access to critical reports and metrics on mobile devices and new support for Android devices and mobile BI for iPhone.
• Big data: Support for Apache Hadoop and deeper support for the SAP HANA platform enabling high-performance analytics on petabyte-scale data.
• Insights: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software to gain immediate, interactive access to data to create visualisations.
• Social: Integration between the SAP StreamWork application and BI documents to increase social collaboration.
• Integration: Deeper SAP application integration enabling customers to run operational reporting off the SAP ERP application and multi-source universes. By providing access to the SAPNet Weaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application across all clients, total cost of ownership (TCO) and complexity is reduced.
The 1.0.1 release of SAP Visual Intelligence will allow users to use personal data sources such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and CSV files, in addition to data from SAP HANA. It also features SAP StreamWork connectivity for collaborative BI. The desktop BI solution works with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and has read and write integration with SAP HANA.
According to SAP, the software will help businesses analyse data through the visualisation of key findings – which means that decision-making processes do not need to rely on the interpretation of data sources from IT.
“With the most complete BI portfolio available today, SAP is also working hard on the service and support front to make our five-pillar BI vision a reality for any sized business, industry or line of business,” said Adam Binnie, global vice president and general manager, business intelligence solutions, SAP, on SAP’s BI strategy.
Howard Dresner, BI expert and chief research officer, Dresner Advisory Services, commented on how SAP’s announcement reflects growing trends in the BI industry.
“New innovations in areas such as ‘big data,’ cloud, collaboration, mobile, predictive, social and visualisation have helped create a renaissance for the entire BI industry,” Dresner said.
“It’s an exciting time for BI, with bountiful opportunities for organisations and lines of business to arm users with unique insights that can improve decision-making processes and transform businesses. Now more than ever before, BI solutions are accessible, affordable, complete, flexible, scalable and usable.”
