South African SAP users got a first look at BusinessObjects version 4 (BO 4.0) last week, when it was unveiled at Vodaworld, in Midrand.
BO 4.0 was announced last October and ramped up to key international customers in December, with main features being SAP's high-speed in-memory architecture (HANA), support for multiple data sources (universes in SAP's lingo), direct support for SAP, and mobile access thanks to its acquisition of Sybase.
BusinessObjects was itself acquired by SAP 18 months ago. SAP UK's solution principal for governance, risk and compliance, Chris Johnston, said the new version was the result of a long integration effort.
"Because these products have different histories, they have had different architectures and it has taken a few years and iterations to get to this stage. This isn't the end game, but we've now managed to integrate all the functionalities. One of our previous weaknesses was the reporting. We had a technically great product, but there were some issues around the reporting which have now been fixed."
Paul Webel, newly-appointed BI manager for SAP SA, said BO 4.0 was designed to make sense of the mountains of data companies have accumulated.
"Companies have been running SAP and doing transactional business for 35 years and now, with these tools, they can unlock the value of that data; not only the core SAP systems, but also other repositories of structured and unstructured data that can give them insight."
Webel said the instant response and the perception of the brand in the market through networks like Twitter was another important feature.
"If a retailer is aware of trends, then they can divert stock to where it's needed. And the ability to engage social media is one of the features of BO 4.0."
Michael Jones, solution manager for business intelligence at SAP SA, says there has been a lot of interest in the product, particularly in the business warehouse integration, and because it's an open and heterogeneous solution.
"What I like about BO 4 is that it supports both SAP and non-SAP environments with the multi-source universe. There's no doubt we went through a bit of turmoil when the acquisition happened, but we've done a lot of work on the integration. I'm also very bullish about Africa. Some say it's five years away from being a mature market, but I think the maturity will get there sooner."
SAP's international customers have made much of the company's in-memory technology - HANA - which in some cases reduces the times for complex queries from hours down to just a few seconds. Local integrator SCT Services CEO Victor van der Watt says when processing queries in parallel entirely in memory, BusinessObjects Explorer can accommodate very large data volumes across as much of the data warehouse as desired.
"Business users can enjoy greater flexibility in the types of queries they make, and they can access full historical data," he says.
Van der Watt says this functionality provides a significant advantage over traditional data warehousing, in which maintenance-intensive aggregations forced IT developers to be selective about the BI functionality and data sets they made available.
"In those instances, only mission-critical data and applications could be deployed."
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