SAP officially released on Wednesday its business intelligence (BI) accelerator that it co-developed with Intel.The two companies first announced they were working on the analytical engine a year ago.SAP also worked closely with both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, along with Intel. The engine enables customers to quickly analyze and query huge amounts of their business data on the fly without having to pre-aggregate and store the information in a database prior to querying it. The accelerator interfaces with SAP’s NetWeaver business intelligence software.“It gives a Google-like experience on collections of data,” Shai Agassi, president of SAP’s product and technology group, said in a Wednesday keynote address at the company’s U.S. Sapphire user conference in Orlando, Fla. In the lab, SAP thought BI accelerator was “beyond cool,” he said, but the company was curious to see how users took to the engine. The BI accelerator comes pre-installed on blade servers from IBM or HP powered by Intel’s 64-bit Xeon processor. SAP shipped BI accelerator to 30 initial customers in October 2005, including Novartis, Coca-Cola and British Petroleum. Once it had implemented the engine, beverage manufacturer Coca-Cola saw the time to run a query against 60 million rows of data drop from 30 to three seconds, Agassi said. British Petroleum used BI accelerator to more rapidly query five fiscal quarters of its retail data gathered from all its gas stations across Europe amounting to more than 1 billion data records.In trialing BI accelerator, SAP has recently been using blades based on Intel’s latest dual-core Xeon processor, code-named Woodcrest, and has seen a doubling in performance speeds over the older Xeon chips it initially used last year, Agassi said.The BI accelerator will help bring SAP closer to “the Holy Grail of providing analytics to the masses,” Agassi said. The engine can feed query reports to users via the Duet integration SAP has announced between its applications and Microsoft’s software.It may also use Project Muse, SAP’s upcoming new user interface for its offerings.SAP may look for the BI accelerator to run on blades from vendors other than HP and IBM, Agassi said. “We expect thousands of the devices to go out to the market,” he added.Although SAP hasn’t formally released pricing for BI accelerator, in his keynote, Agassi priced the engine at a little under US$200,000. -China Martens, IDG News ServiceFor related news coverage, read SAP Broadens Customer Base at Sapphire and SAP Stresses Master-Data Management.Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content brandpost Sponsored by Freshworks When your AI chatbots mess up AI ‘hallucinations’ present significant business risks, but new types of guardrails can keep them from doing serious damage By Paul Gillin Dec 08, 2023 4 mins Generative AI brandpost Sponsored by Dell New research: How IT leaders drive business benefits by accelerating device refresh strategies Security leaders have particular concerns that older devices are more vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. By Laura McEwan Dec 08, 2023 3 mins Infrastructure Management case study Toyota transforms IT service desk with gen AI To help promote insourcing and quality control, Toyota Motor North America is leveraging generative AI for HR and IT service desk requests. By Thor Olavsrud Dec 08, 2023 7 mins Employee Experience Generative AI ICT Partners feature CSM certification: Costs, requirements, and all you need to know The Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) certification sets the standard for establishing Scrum theory, developing practical applications and rules, and leading teams and stakeholders through the development process. By Moira Alexander Dec 08, 2023 8 mins Certifications IT Skills Project Management Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe