SAP: BI Tool Will Help Create 'clear Enterprises'
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.
