Today I attended the SAP BI 4.0 launch event at the Royal College of Physicians in Regent’s Park London, the first major launch event for Business Objects since being firmly under the SAP banner lending it a degree of expectation amongst the BO user community. With all said and done the day had a slightly unusual structure, interleaving the “new features” sessions with “the future of BI” and “other interesting stuff” talks so the remainder of this post covers the main themes of the day and the “big picture” topics whilst I’ve broken out the new features into a “What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4 / SAP BI 4.0?” post.
The morning’s main talk came from SAP’s Technology Evangelist, Timo Elliott (for those of you from the SQL Server world think of a cross between Brent Ozar and Andrew Fryer) who delivered a punchy and informative overview of the ‘big ticket’ enhancements coming in 4.0. The main themes of Timo’s talk an of the day in general were the forthcoming enhancements in the Enterprise Analytics space including the recently acquired Column-Oriented data store Sybase IQ and AP’s latest iteration of In-Memory analysis, HANA (High-performance ANalytical Appliance). HANA will run on hardware from vendors such as IBM and HP with upwards of 1TB RAM and sit between SAP BW and other large data sources providing lightning-fast (up to 350x faster in SAP tests) though later iterations of HANA will all-but replace the current storage engine behind SAP BW (planned late 2011) and ultimately will replace the entire data storage infrastructure behind SAP’s ERP systems and potentially other third-party applications.
Timo’s enthusiasm for these new technologies clearly showed and having been in the industry (and the company) for 20 years it’s worth noting that he described the advent of large-scale in-memory analytics as a “once in a decade” leap in capability and for Enterprise-class organisations I’m quite sure it will be but having worked in much smaller companies I’m somewhat sceptical about how much of an impact it will make at the lower end of the market.
Another major theme for the day was the advent of Analytic Applications, essentially packaged BI and Data Warehouse products pre-built for specific industries (e.g. Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing) or for departmental purposes (e.g. Finance, HR). Demoed by Jeff Veis and Andy Hirst, these applications are presented as a series of dashboards but since much of the underlying KPI definitions and data architecture are already built they can reduce implementation time to as little as 12 weeks vs. 6-9 months for a ‘from scratch’ implementation. It’s easy to be sceptical about this as we all tend to believe that our problems are unique but each application is focused so closely on a particular industry/department that even if they’re only able to meet 70% of the core requirements out of the box the simplicity and reduced timescales ought to be well worth the sacrifice, especially since they’re customisable after the initial setup.
The third major theme of the day was Data Quality, in fact in addition to the session on Information Steward by Barry Dodds and Dave Pugh four other speakers made a point of telling the audience that everybody in the room had data quality problems – it’s probably true but I couldn’t help feeling a little nagged by the end of it all! The tool itself seemed very capable and for a DQ application it was remarkably visual and included dashboard-style elements (to paraphrase Barry) “using analytics to improve analytics” which despite being a cool soundbite is a actually a very sensible approach to take.
Also announced was the new Complex Event Processing engine Event Insight, essentially these CEP engines (like Microsoft’s StreamInsight) take an incoming stream of events in real-time from operational systems and provide monitoring and alerting capabilities as well as processing for more traditional reporting and dashboarding. Additional products mentioned but not thoroughly explored were a collaboration tool sapstreamwork.com and a new unstructured text processing engine that is able to parse free text such as Twitter feeds and provide “sentiment analysis” as well as tagging various context indicators including geography.
Roadmap wise we were told to export more along the lines of Pervasive BI, Big Data, Social / Collaboration and more in the Mobile BI space. On the latter we should expect enhancements to the existing Business Objects Explorer mobile app as well as a native WebI application, mobile platforms mentioned included Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad and even the RIM Playbook but oddly no mention of Android. I’m not sure if it was left off of the slide by accident or there are legitimately no Android plans, I’d assume the former since Android is almost certain to become the market leader in terms of wide-spread adoption.
In addition to the Business Objects staff there were also a couple of external speakers both of whom gave interesting talks…
Tony Harper of Capgemini who spoke on the general topic of Mobile BI, highlighting the increased user expectations presented by high quality consumer-oriented smartphone and tablet apps as a particular challenge. The talk was thought-provoking and in particular it Tony’s statement that Mobile BI projects will be “sending information farther from the walls of the data centre than ever before” really underscored one of his main themes that providing so many people in so many disparate locations live access to your data will significantly stretch both performance and data quality and these expectations should be factored into Mobile BI projects from the beginning.
Following Tony was Alys Woodward from the research firm IDC who gave a good talk on the factors influencing BI uptake within organisations listing the most important contributing factors as being as Degree of Training (including training on KPIs as well as the tools), Design Quality (of architecture and processes), Non-Executive Involvement (i.e. get the business users involved), Importance of Governance and Use of Performance Management Methodology (the last two being important drivers in organisations where they are relevant).
Don’t forget to check out my ”What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4 / SAP BI 4.0?” post too for more detail on the core Business Objects product stack.
Categories:
Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Sybase, The Cloud Tags:
Analytical Applications, Andrew Fryer, BI, BI 4.0, Blackberry, BO, Brent Ozar, Capgemini, CEP, Column-Oriented, Data Quality, DQ, ERP, Event Insight, HANA, IDC, In-Memory, Information Steward, iOS, iPad, iPhone, IQ, Mobile BI, Playbook, SAP, SAP BW, Sybase, Timo Elliott, WinMo, XIR4
Having been at the London SAP BI 4.0 Launch event I have divided my write-up between general themes (see here) and detailing the new features of the classic Business Objects product suite that were revealed on the day.
The first words on the first slide of Varik Torsteinsen’s talk were: “4.0 is here”, followed swiftly by a contradictory “well, almost”! The product is currently in “ramp-up” phase with selected customers being given access to the 4.0 software downloads but will most likely reach General Availability at the end of May. The current supported migration path will be from XI R2 SP2 or XI R3.0 or above, there was no specific mention of migration tools or process.
Possibly the largest single change might be the introduction of an entirely new Semantic Layer and the replacement of the Universe Designer tool with the Information Design Tool (IDT). The new semantic layer includes elements from the old Data Federator product (which presumably no longer exists) and allows a single universe to combine data from multiple sources, a great leap forward for BO but something OBIEE (nee Siebel Analytics) has been able to do for a while.
Some of the small (but very welcome changes) include support for 64-bit operating systems, enhanced virtualisation support, additional monitoring and a re-written auditing back-end. Along with the functional changes there was the usual biennial nomenclature shuffle that Business Objects tend to put us all through, the main changes being…
- Xcelsius will now be called SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
- InfoView will now be called BI Launchpad.
- Dashboard Builder will now be called BI Workspaces.
- Voyager and Pioneer will now be called SAP BusinessObjects Analysis.
Crystal reports still exists and appears to have a new and slicker UI, the dashboard builder (BI Workspaces) has also been improved and should result in much faster design-times.
Web Intelligence doesn’t seem to have changed fundamentally (don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing) though there have been a number of enhancements that will prove popular including the addition of new chart types including variable slice height pies, scatter bubbles, polar bubbles, tag clouds, box plots, heat maps and tree maps. There are more tabs and tab-like options available in the UI to allow access to additional functionality, documents can be pinned in the BI Launchpad and will retained the pinned status across sessions – a great way to make sure you always look at your data assurance report!
The Query Panel also now has a Data Preview pane at the bottom-right and direct visibility of the data in the Data Provider is now possible, though I didn’t see whether the raw data could be saved independently I’d assume it can be. Reports can now be based on Excel documents, Analysis Views, BeX, text-files, Web Services and you can even create a report with no data provider at all. Copying report elements from one report to another is now possible, the chart/table will move and also bring the Data Provider along with it – it appeared that this was instant as well so it potentially may not even require another request to the database.
I’ve still got a lot of questions that I didn’t get a chance to answer today (Grouping? Free-hand SQL? Hiding?) but what I did see was worthwhile although I would say that perhaps WebI still looks a bit slower than it ought to although that could be down to using laptops for demos. I hope my round-up helped, I did leave some things out so please feel free to ask if you’ve any other questions.
Categories:
Business Intelligence, Business Objects Tags:
Analysis, BI Launchpad, BI Workspaces, BO, Business Objects, Dashboards, Federated Query, IDT, Infoview, OBIEE, Pioneer, SAP, Universe, Voyager, WebI, Xcelsius
I just received the following alert from the UK Business Objects User Group (very good, you should join) and have scraped the following text from the SAP support site…
SAP Business Objects Enterprise Daylight Savings Brief
Applies To: All Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier, and XI 3.1 SP3+ (FP3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 ) Environments.
Brief: Due to Daylight Savings Time changes that went into effect on March 13, 2011 in the Americas and are scheduled for March 27, 2011 in Europe there is a potential of scheduling issues and excessive failed instances to appear on Recurring Daily Schedules in Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier as well as XI 3.1 SP3+ environments. If you encounter any issues please refer to the SAP Knowledge bases below for workarounds and resolutions and if required please raise a Message for Processing to via the Service Marketplace.
I’ve installed the fix pack recommended here: https://websmp210.sap-ag.de/sap/support/notes/1448881 and I’ll post an update after the weekend to say whether or not it worked.
UPDATE: The instance of Business Objects that I manage appears to have crossed the clock change boundary without any duplication of scheduled reports so either the fix pack mentioned above did the trick or the issue itself did not occur!
UPDATE: An excellent workaround has been posted by one of the members of the BOB Forums, please see this thread.
Hot on the heels of my Business Objects problems with Firefox, I’ve now encountered an issue with Internet Explorer 9 (again a new release), again with the Java / Tomcat version. Whenever I click to view or modify a report I receive the following error message…
Thankfully everything is fine in the IIS / ASPx version but nonetheless I am still advising my users not to upgrade until either Microsoft or SAP are able to provide a fix.
UPDATE: Milos, a reader of bisql.net has posted a comment on this thread with a workaround:
- Enter “about:config” in the browser’s address bar.
- Search for “html5.parser.enable”.
- Double-click the row to set the value to “false” (row should also go bold to indicate change).
There is a possibility that it may cause HTML5 compatibility issues down the road but it solved the issue I experienced in XI 3.1 so thanks Milos!
Mozilla released Firefox 4 yesterday, touting speed improvements as one of the key features so I installed it to see if it would make a good client for Business Objects. Unfortunately it seems that there is a bug whereby Firefox fails to recognise that Java is correctly installed and so whenever I go to modify a report using the Java Query Panel I see the following screen…
… and when I click on the “Install Missing Plugins” button I end up with the following message stating “No suitable plugins were found.”…
I tried re-installing both 32-bit and 64-bit Java runtime packages and it made no difference whatsoever, I then reinstalled Firefox 4 with still no change. For now I’ve gone back to Firefox 3.6 and it works like a charm so until I see an updated version or a decent workaround I am advising my users not to upgrade.
UPDATE: since the event has now passed you can also read my SAP BI 4.0 Launch rundown and my What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4.0 posts, of course – don’t let that put you off reading the remainder of the article below…
I just wanted to give people a head’s up – SAP are running a “Launch Event” for the upcoming 4.0 releases of their BI and EIM tools in London on the 7th of April, I’m assuming that this is going to be the release of the XI 4.0 product though there could be a change in branding to remove the ‘XI’ portion and fall more in line with SAP’s naming conventions. I’ve not seen much in the way of expected features so it’ll be an interesting event I expect, most of the speakers are unfamiliar to me although I’ve seen Richard Neale speak at a number of BOUG (Business Objects User Group) events and he always comes across confidently gives a compelling view of the product.
One thing that is clear is that there’s definitely some coming together of traditional SAP products and the Business Objects line, if nothing else the sponsors/exhibitors bear that out pretty clearly with the inclusion a few ‘big guns’ such as Atos Origin and Cap Gemini as well as some smaller SAP specialists like Bluefin and Edenhouse.
In terms of what to expect, that’s tough – there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on shiny new features such as Mobile BI, advanced dashboarding and data visualisation but that’s not what I’m there to see. I’m really hoping for a slicker version of Web Intelligence, less fiddly and more intuitive – you can achieve a lot in the current version of WebI but the interface feels a little dated when compared to many of today’s web tools.
The lag between cloud and in-house software suites is something I think all BI vendors suffer from and it will be a tough problem to solve. Cloud services are able to evolve continually whilst installed applications represent a snapshot of the industry’s ‘state of the art’ at the time of release and large corporate installations will almost always be 1 or 2 versions behind the bleeding edge. This never used to be much of a problem but now most users are familiar with rich interactive web tools such as Google Docs, Mobile Me, Nike+ and Garmin Connect – now when your users come into the office they have certain expectations and at the moment I think many BI tools fall somewhat short either in functionality or ease of use. On a related note I also expect to hear more too about potential cloud offerings from SAP or SAP partners.
Whatever happens I’m sure it will be an interesting day and of course I’ll post an event wrap-up for those of you that can’t attend, if you feel like coming along you can register at sapevent.co.uk/4launch and perhaps I’ll see you there.
