IDG News Service — 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.

Global foods manufacturer Sara Lee was one of the beta testers for Explorer, said Vincent Vloemans, director of global information management at the company.

Sara Lee 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, Vloemans said.

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."

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