SAP intros analytics marketplace

SAP has created a dedicated business analytics area in its business intelligence (BI) EcoHub online applications marketplace, which will include both its own tools and those developed by partners, writes MyCustomer.com.

The applications giant set up the EcoHub Web site in October 2008 and started including a limited number of partner offerings in 2009 before expanding the service out in October this year. It is now organising the more than 100 business analytics offerings it has available under a single umbrella in a bid to provide customers with a 'one-stop-shop'.

Sanjay Poonen, executive vice-president and general manager for SAP's analytics, line of business and industry solutions unit, says the marketplace would act as a "resource for customers and prospects to test our solutions via a free trial, consume our solutions via a subscription model, download mobile analytic solutions and share information such as reports by line of business via SAP EcoHub".

Salesforce.com has unleashed a host of new product releases it says will further extend social and mobile elements - already playing out in the consumer world - into the enterprise environment, says ZDNet Asia.

During his keynote address at the company's Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff pointed to 2000 when Amazon.com emerged, operating on an architecture which he felt best represented the way enterprise software should be built; on the cloud.

"Today, the question I ask is 'why are we not building enterprise software like Facebook?'” asked Benioff. Describing the 10-year span in which the Web has evolved, from "Cloud 1 to Cloud 2", he said tabs have become feeds, information has moved from being pulled to pushed, users no longer 'click' but 'touch' screens to access information, and desktops have given way to smartphones and tablets.

DSPanel, a BI provider, recently availed the availability of an Apple iPad data visualisation and analytics application which is the latest addition to its Performance Canvas mobile analytics product group, states TMCNet.

It says users now have the ability to create, modify and share interactive, real-time visual queries and dashboards wherever they are by using this new iPad application. Due to the iPad's touch-based interface, users can “easily drop, drop, rotate, expand and collapse their visualisations, allowing users to truly interact with their data.”

DSPanel says it was the first company to provide BI to the mobile business community. The company is extremely happy to add iPad analytics to the ever-growing family mobile-based business productivity tools.