BI remains top CIO priority

For the third year in a row, business intelligence (BI) applications have been ranked the top technology priority in the 2008 Gartner Executive Programs survey of 1 500 chief information officers (CIOs), reports SDA Asia.

According to the analyst group, this is because CIOs know they must implement a BI strategy properly if they want to accomplish many other priorities, such as customer service improvement and legacy application modernisation.

"Consolidation activities by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft should help accelerate the value derived from BI," said Bhavish Sood, Gartner senior research analyst.

With the Business Objects acquisition complete, SAP has filled in the details of its BI product roadmap, states Search SAP.

Among its BI and corporate performance management offerings, SAP Business Planning and Consolidation is now SAP's go-to financial and operational planning tool, replacing SAP BI-IP, SAP SEM-BPS, Business Objects Planning XI R2, and Business Objects Planning Ext.

For financial consolidation, SAP has replaced its SEM-BCS tool with Business Objects Cartesis, now known as Financial Consolidation, and SAP Strategy Management, formerly called Pilot, is the new tool for managing enterprise-wide business strategy.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) and SAS Institute in Sendirian Berhad have begun collaboration on a BI competency centre (BICC), based in HP's Kuala Lumpur office and serving clients in South-East Asia, says The Star Online.

The BICC will package business solutions that build on the framework of HP's best practices in BI and SAS's strength on BI solutions for specific vertical markets.

Officials said this would help to bring BI solutions, traditionally used only by large multinational corporations, into the mainstream where not so large companies could also benefit from deploying them.