SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise

SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise provides a flexible, scalable business intelligence (BI) which allows to find and exchange data for effective decision making. The product offers broad tool kit on a single platform and allows IT departments to implement BI in any application or process in different environments.

In September, 2010 SAP announced a new partner initiative for the companies of small and medium business: for the first time in Russia the set-up solutions based on SAP solutions will be proposed at the fixed prices and an implementation time. At the same time the offered price of solutions includes both licenses, and an implementation service.

The solutions of partners of SAP proposed within this initiative on the terms of the fixed price and project duration, it is possible to separate into three groups at the moment:

• ERP solutions based on SAP All-in-One worth from 160 to 390 thousand euros and of implementation of 3-5 months;
• Analytical solutions based on SAP Business Objects with the cost from 25 to 115 thousand euros and of implementation of 2-4 months;
• Solutions for personnel management based on the SAP solutions ERP HCM with the cost of 50 thousand euros and an implementation time of 4-6 months.

The Segment of the packaged solutions for small and medium business includes industry solutions for retail, distribution, banks, insurance, the production sphere today. Also partners of SAP propose cross-industry solutions for such business processes as customer relationship management (CRM), personnel management (HR), the business analyst, service maintenance.

Features

• minimize resources of IT services, having allowed business users to solve independently problems using an extensive set of BI tools on a single platform.
• give an opportunity of use of a business intelligence to all users - as inside, and outside the company.
• carry out integration with the existing IT infrastructure, getting access practically to any data sources, collecting all business intelligence in the uniform BI platform.
• implement a business intelligence in any application or process in any environment using integration packets.

Functionality

• Audit - the current control, the analysis and optimization by means of a set of reports and sample universe of audit.
• Search - information search via the Infoview SAP BusinessObjects portal in reports, indicators and other objects of a system.
• BI widgets - visual representation of a business intelligence on a desktop.
• The central management console - the uniform Web interface for management, control and setup of the BI system.
• The encyclopedia - the information reference book of corporate information.
• InfoView is the Web portal the providing access to users to information as inside, and outside the organization.
• The integration packet for Java portals - allows to integrate objects of BI into Java portals.
• The system of publications (Publishing) - distribution of the personalized maintenance of BI among mass audience.
• Monitoring of the course of process (Process tracker) - allows to connect the maintenance of BI with business processes for decision support.
• Requests in the form of web services (QaaWS) - allows to publish requests in the form of web services and also it is safe to deliver information of BI in any applications which can use web services.
• The integration packet for the Microsoft Office SharePoint portal - allows to integrate BI components into the Microsoft Office SharePoint portal and provides to corporate users the personalized, uniform, safe overview of corporate information.
• Packets of development of programs (SDK) - includes packets of development of the Java EE and Microsoft.NET programs familiar to users which provide close integration with platforms based on Java and Microsoft.
• The designer of universe (Universe designer) - the tool of graphic design for creation of semantic layers (metadata).

SAP BusinessObjects 4.0

In the summer of 2012 of SAP updated the family of BI products, having improved support of mobile platforms, having added social functions and having expanded possibilities of the analysis of Big Data.

In software products of SAP for a business intelligence there were new features which, according to the statement of the company, will provide to users stronger base for acceptance of reasonable business solutions on the basis of the analysis of the Big Data generated at operating activities.

SAP announced new opportunities of a set of a SAP software of Business Objects Business Intelligence 4.0 in the feature pack 3 service pack. The company also provided release of 1.0.1 SAP products Visual Intelligence, having characterized it as powerful and convenient analytics tools in work. All this became known on July 17 at the SAP Analytics Forum North America conference organized by the German company in the North American headquarters to Newtown Square (piece Pennsylvania).

At the next Business Objects 4.0 service pack there are more developed access functions to means of BI (business intelligence) via mobile devices, including based on Apple iOS and Google Android. Other innovation is support of the platform open source Apache Hadoop for high-performance analytical processing of large volumes of data and more thorough implementation of the SAP HANA DBMS technology working with data in RAM.

SAP application of Explorer provides visualization tools for more clear understanding of analytical results of BI. In the updated product integration into the social application of SAP StreamWork for more effective interaction of the employees working with the BI project is also improved. At last It is necessary to tell that the third service pack is more closely integrated with other software platforms of SAP and, in particular, with its ERP products.

As reported, the strategy of SAP is based on four directions of innovations. First, the organizations want to understand, how effectively they work, and data analysis, their visualization, reports, sharing of information are for this purpose more and more important. Secondly, the practical convenience and a possibility of independent connection to the BI tools help users to understand data more deeply. Thirdly, today it is very important that the business intelligence was available to workers from any place and from any device. And, fourthly, the increasing value is found by joint work with BI projects through social networks of the enterprises.

It agrees to the data of Gartner published in April, SAP owns the greatest market share among all suppliers of means of BI and analytics which made 23.6% in 2011, and turnover of the company grew since 2010 by 19.5%. Market shares of her closest competitors are estimated as follows: Oracle has 15.6%, SAS Institute has 12.6%, IBM has 12.1% and at Microsoft 8.7%. Total sales volume in this IT sector since 2010 increased by 16.4% and was 12.2 bln. dollars in 2011.

SAP BusinessObjects 4.1

The SAP solutions BusinessObjects BI 4.1 help heads and account managers to obtain the most up-to-date and necessary information in real time. This professional platform sets new standards for any companies with any IT infrastructure and provides data access to all employees. Features of the new version of a solution package for a business intelligence:

• The convenient unified and adaptable platform in use with interaction functions.
• Powerful tools of visualization, including recently released SAP solution Lumira which presents in the evident form data and space analytics for the most different industries.
• The "Big Data" supported by services Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive. The improved access to Oracle Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. In version 4.1 support of worker threads of the SAP HANA platform and the data warehouse is improved SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
• The new solution of SAP Crystal Server and release of SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge are adapted for the companies of small and medium business.