BusinessObjects Explorer and Constellation Tools

[admin]

SAP unveils two new products

- May 12 2009, 00:32 AM

A leading provider of enterprise software has unveiled new applications, which form part of its new focus on business intelligence (BI).

SAP has announced the imminent release of the navigation tool BusinessObjects Explorer and the program Constellation, which integrates social networking and BI solutions.

Explorer was described by the company as an iTunes for analytics that will provide customers with "intuitive and immediate access" to the data required to make sound business decisions.

Katrina Coyle, global information manager for Molson Coors, which has been testing BusinessObjects Explorer, believes the tool has "great potential".

She said: "Everyone who has worked with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer has appreciated that it is fast and user-friendly, with results that can be easily shared and put to use immediately."

Last month, SAP unveiled its BusinessObjects Edge BI application, which was developed by the program provider to help small and medium-sized companies to create efficient and productive workplace strategies.

[admin]

AP: BI tool will help create 'clear enterprises'
The company has high hopes for its new BusinessObjects Explorer tool
Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 13 May, 2009 08:39

Companies must achieve "clarity" to navigate out of the global recession and SAP intends to help them with its BI (business intelligence) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, co-CEO Leo Apotheker said during the opening keynote of SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando Tuesday.

"The only antidote against uncertainty is clarity," he said.

Apotheker's 75-minute address focused heavily on a new BI application called BusinessObjects Explorer, which is supposed to help average business users easily navigate and mine company data without the help of IT staff.

"We're not just talking about a reporting tool," Apotheker said. "I am convinced it will fundamentally change the way decisions are made in enterprises around the world. ... We're going to be able to cross the chasm from, 'I think this is a good decision' to 'I know this is a good decision.'"

In a demonstration, SAP showed how users could make natural-language queries to search for information about the rate of head injuries in car accidents during a certain period. Users can "drill down" into the results to view statistics for certain age groups, for example, as well as view it in various formats, such as pie charts.

The Explorer tool combines the Polestar technology SAP acquired by buying Business Objects, with SAP's NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator software. It represents "the first huge salvo" in a strategy to push BI to all users in a company, said John Schwarz, CEO of the Business Objects portfolio, in an interview.

SAP plans to make Web 2.0-style interfaces like the one for Explorer "pervasive" across its applications, said Marge Breya, executive vice president and general manager, Intelligence Platform Group and SAP NetWeaver Solution Management, during a press conference Tuesday. The company plans to make more announcements in coming months, she said, but she did not elaborate.

Also, Business Objects' sizable Oracle customer base -- which Breya said has traditionally represented 70 percent of its business -- cannot yet fully gain the levels of Explorer performance demonstrated at Sapphire. That's because SAP won't be releasing an "open accelerator" compatible with Oracle software until later this year, Breya said. "Of course, Explorer itself as a tool works on Oracle today," she added.

Meanwhile, one SAP customer who has been beta testing Explorer gave it a general thumbs up, albeit with a few caveats.

Food manufacturer Sara Lee has connected the software to a sandbox that contains 300 million rows of data, and despite the scope of the data store, performance has been strong, said Vincent Vloemans, director of global information management.

Also, the preliminary response among Sara Lee's business users has been "very positive," he said. I'm getting questions like 'When can we have it.'"

But Sara Lee has not yet decided to purchase the software, and there are substantial underlying tasks to perform as well, he added.

"This is giving us the horsepower [to analyze data] but we need to have harmonized and structured data underneath it."

The company also hasn't done a deep investigation into security measures or protocols, he said.

But the tool does seem to have some clear positives, according to Vloemans. For one, it doesn't require much training. "If you can use a PC then you can learn how to use it in one or two minutes."

Secondly, Sara Lee has a broad BI strategy, and making changes to respond to user demands, such as for a new type of report, is costly, he said.

Vloemans said he has "a gut feeling," but is not yet certain that Explorer could cut expenses overall, even weighed against the cost of preparing the data to be searched by Explorer.

Meanwhile, Apotheker's keynote also briefly touched upon SAP's plans for on-demand software, which include Web-based extensions for its on-premise business applications. Extensions for expense management and human capital management are in the pipeline, he said.

SAP is also continuing to work on its Business ByDesign integrated ERP suite for the midmarket.

The company has slowed the rollout of Business ByDesign while it works to ensure it can make enough of a profit at scale. SAP executive board member Bill McDermott said in a recent interview that the company would likely not ramp up Business ByDesign until the end of this year.

However, a running Business ByDesign system will be on display at Sapphire this week, according to Apotheker.

[admin]

SAP business intelligence becomes more “Google-like”

By Rosalie Marshall
May 13, 2009

SAP has launched Business Objects Explorer, which it says brings business intelligence analysis capabilities to all business users.

SAP launched the new product at its Sapphire customer and partner event in Orlando, where it also announced it had finished integrating it 2007 Business Objects purchase with the rest of the SAP portfolio.

The aim is to benefit an organisation in terms of increased efficiency and more informed decision-making, SAP said.

“We have traditionally been focussed on technology that was targeted at technology experts,” said Business Objects chief executive, John Schwarz.

“We need to break out of the high priest of analysis and allow everyone in the organisation, even the CEO, to have the ability to click and search. We need to become more Google-like to give a generic term,” he added.

Schwarz said driving the launch of Business Objects Explorer had been the introduction of new employees into the workforce that had just graduated and who have a very different attitude to IT tools.

He said they are used to sites like Facebook that allow users to collaborate and share.

Meanwhile the way data is being consumed is also changing the business intelligence landscape he continured.

“It was traditionally looked at in databases but now data comes from everywhere…all of this needs to be made available to people to allow them to make good decisions,” Schwarz said.

Business Objects Explorer will bring together the search and navigation capabilities from Business Objects with the in-memory capabilities and compression technology from SAP’s Netweaver.

Marge Breya, SAP Netweaver Intelligence Platform Group vice president told conference attendees, that the combination “delivers something that neither product could have done on its own”.

Breya demonstrated in a presentation that without any training, business users will be able to enter key words into a search box to find data they need, then drill down into specific areas for further investigation.

Users will also be given virtualisation features to draw up charts or reports that best represent the information.

While the IT department may wonder what it is getting from the solutions, Breya added, it is being given a compliant and controllable infrastructure.

Analyst firm Forrester questioned what resources IT will need to make the solution work for the business.

Breya explained SAP would first make the new business intelligence experience work on Business Warehouse data.

Then “Wave Two”, which SAP plans to rollout later this year, will allow customers to use the analysis tool on all information from their enterprise.

Breya additionally said Wave Two would see “SAP put master data management solutions in the hands of business users” to allow them to form their own governance and storage of data policies.

Meanwhile Schwarz spoke of a new SAP policy to make applications independent of hardware to allow users to keep using the same processes with new devices.

Schwarz said this strategy will give customers a choice between deploying applications through an on-demand fashion or through an on-premise scenario.

SAP also wants to separate the application’s code from the application’s data, he said, “Because the application changes a lot more than the user interface.”

[Jane B]

Madan Sheina

Explorer accelerates Polestar

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer combines SAP's Polestar search-and exploration BI interface with its Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) in-memory acceleration technology. SAP has been talking up this combination for several months prior to the announcement. The marriage of these two technologies is simple - ease and speed of analysis. Search is a widely understood and accepted way of accessing information. In-memory acceleration is admittedly less so, but vendors are hoping to fast-track attention. However, SAP's top billing of Explorer at this year's Sapphire conference isn't a ground-breaking announcement. We think it's a bit late to the party and will only start to appeal to a larger audience once it broadens its data access beyond SAP data warehouses.

Explorer is about ease and speed of analysis, but only for BW users right now

Explorer is basically a mash-up of two existing technologies in SAP's portfolio: a Google-like search and navigation interface for BI (Polestar) running on top of SAP's in-memory analytic appliance (BWA), which was formerly called BI Accelerator.

Explorer plays directly into a strategy pursued by most BI vendors today, namely pervasive BI, through easy-to-use front ends that provide fast learning curves for users with little or no training, and short time to value. It does so by allowing casual business users to query data with the ease of an Internet search engine using natural language rather than SQL statements - quite a compelling proposition. However, this is more than just a Google search box. Polestar goes a lot further by putting query results in context, using a variety of novel data visualisations of cuts of data as users interactively drill up, down and across datasets to help them better understand the information that's being displayed - for example, in the context of a SAP report screen.

That 'on-the-fly' analysis requires query performance and scalability, which is where BWA comes into play. Polestar hit a ceiling with large data volumes. BWA removes that since it leverages BWA indexes and doesn't require customers to first construct a BusinessObjects 'universe' - as the first Polestar tool required. The net result is lightning quick response times. Early customer references have been impressive - less than three seconds to analyse 300 million records. And since the in-memory approach doesn't tie the analysis down to any predefined paths or hierarchies, users have greater analytic latitude.

The only thing that takes the wind out of the sails of Explorer is its data access. The first release of Explorer is exclusively tied to SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) data. SAP will only provide support for non-SAP data in a second release that's expected to ship late in the fourth quarter of 2009. That's not to say there are no opportunities in its BW niche. Both Polestar and BWA are relatively new products and many of SAP's BW customers have yet to buy them. This new combination might well spur adoption to a new user base (casual business users) as BW's native interface BeX is targeted at IT-savvy users. However, Explorer will only realise its full market potential when it is decoupled from BW.
Nor is Explorer the only analysis and visualisation tool in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. There's also WebIntelligence, Xcelsius and Crystal. It's unclear if interoperability and metadata consistency issues will arise from the fact that Explorer doesn't use a BusinessObjects universe as its semantic layer. The challenge for SAP is to clearly demarcate usage of each tool. SAP might eventually have to consolidate or rationalise some of its overlapping tools so as not to confuse customers.

SAP is a latecomer to the in-memory BI party

We don't doubt the value of Explorer for making BI more pervasive, but believe it's a latecomer to the in-memory party. In-memory BI technologies have been around for ages - BWA has been on the market for around three years, with around 500 production sites. Other noteworthy plays include QlikTech, Tibco Spotfire and IBM Cognos (Applix TM1). MicroStrategy also added in-memory analysis in its Version 9 BI platform release earlier this year and Microsoft announced it will add in-memory capabilities to its Project Gemini release in 2010.
While Explorer follows in the footsteps of many other in-memory products - unlike QlikTech's product, for example - it's not deployed as a standalone product. Rather it's designed to be integrated into existing BI environments. That's true for the first release at least, but SAP promises to package it as a standalone appliance in the next release.

While we wonder why it's taken SAP so long to productise the technology (Polestar and BWA have been in SAP's portfolio for some time), Explorer is a healthy sign of integration progressing between the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio and SAP NetWeaver BI assets.