The strongest impression I got from my trip this year down to the annual SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando was the deliberate movement of SAP® toward the end user experience. This has by no means been familiar territory for the world's largest ERP vendor. The giant from Waldorf has never been known for being big on user interfaces.
That all seems to be changing – for the good. After spending many years getting the underpinnings of their various software platforms firmed up and running smoothly, it seems SAP has now turned its attention to the look and feel of its human interface. I spent a lot of time at the Business Intelligence "pod" in the NetWeaver village and got a good look at some of the newest advances on the SAP BI front:
Visual Composer
While arguably not a pure-play BI tool, the SAP folks put on some pretty impressive demos showing Visual Composer being used to create "dashboard-like" applications using a point-and-click interface. They were also sure to point out the seamless availability of non-SAP data sources. It was being touted as a BI tool for business users. That remains to be seen. Regardless, this is clearly a step in the right direction that provides the business process expert with a way to create their own process automation/business intelligence applications without having to get their hands dirty with code. This application's ability to cut across multiple platforms and wear different hats makes it SAP's decathlon entry.
Report Designer
This is the "Crystal-like" formatting solution that many SAP customers have been hearing about for some time now. Interestingly enough, it starts off with five sections (Report Header, Page Header, Details, Report Footer, and Page Footer). Should sound pretty familiar to anyone familiar with Crystal Reports®. Of course, it's hard to tell from watching a demo how it stacks up in regards to functionality. Suffice it to say, it certainly doesn't have the depth and breadth of a seasoned BI application like Crystal Reports. Bottom line: SAP has officially entered the "formatted printing" game with a rough but eager player.
The BI Accelerator
This hardware/software solution is SAP's answer to one of the biggest complaints with SAP BW reporting: performance (or the lack thereof). This solution is advertised to provide a 10 to 100 times increase in query performance, which means that queries that used to take minutes will now run in seconds (or sub-second). As you might imagine, this created quite a stir among the faithful. Consider this SAP's entry into the 100 meter dash. Don't blink.
DUET
The new DUET interface (co-developed by SAP and Microsoft) provides another example of how SAP is starting to get serious about meeting users where they live – in this case, Microsoft Office. The most purely "BI" piece of this solution is the ability to access SAP reports directly from within Outlook. This initial version also gives office workers access from within Outlook to work with the time management, budget monitoring, organization management, and leave management functions within SAP. As you might imagine, this got a lot of attention at the show. And why not? Who wouldn't want to see SAP and Microsoft team up for some synchronized swimming?
After seeing firsthand the results of SAP's latest efforts in the Business Intelligence arena, it is clear to me that there is no longer any question that SAP is dead-set on providing its customers with "out of the box" BI functionality looks to compete head-to-head with third party BI vendor solutions. With these latest advances in NetWeaver 2004s, SAP has narrowed the gap considerably and has, as a result, made the question of how to deliver BI services to end users a bit more complicated. It has also turned up the heat on the big third party vendors to more clearly differentiate their products, which in the end should result in even better solutions available for the customer to choose from.
One of our goals here at the SAP Practice of Data Management Group is to help our clients stay on top of these rapid developments in the SAP BI arena. Increased competition will almost certainly result in better choices for customers, which is good for everyone. It also can make it difficult sometimes to differentiate between SAP's and the various third-party vendor offerings, which is where we can step in and help.
So let the BI games begin.
Written by Mike Garrett, Data Management Group Consultant, SAP Practice
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