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SAP plans massive BI reorganisation

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 20 Jul 2012

SAP plans massive BI reorganisation

SAP is planning to organise its analytics and business intelligence (BI) product strategy around five “pillars”, or subject areas, spanning from essential platform technology to social collaboration, the company said on Tuesday, IT World Canada reports.

Other pillars include “creative” technologies, or ones that provide self-service features for individual users; support for mobile analytics; and “extreme” technologies, such as predictive analytics.

Feature pack 3 for the 4.0 version of its Business Objects BI suite, and a new version of SAP's Visual Intelligence tool, both of which are now generally available, include capabilities that touch all five areas, SAP adds.

Added to feature pack 3 of Business Objects 4.0 is advanced support, giving workers access to BI analytics on mobile devices, including those running the Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems, eWeek writes.

Also new is support for the Apache Hadoop open source platform for analysing big data volumes to mine BI and deeper support of the SAP HANA implementation of in-memory database technology.

The SAP Explorer application provides visualisation tools to provide a clearer understanding to end-users of the insights that can be gleaned from BI. The upgrade also improves integration with SAP's StreamWork social application for improving collaboration among employees on a BI project.

Lastly, the service pack 3 improves integration with other SAP software platforms, such as its ERP products.

CIOL quotes Howard Dresner, chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, as saying: “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.

“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.”

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