Explorer(Polestar) Contest Winners Announced

SAP recently sponsored a contest that challenged the developer community to create and demonstrate the most innovative use of the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer APIs inside of another application or process. The challenge was a great success, and SAP received a large number of high-quality submissions. Today, SAP is proud to announce the winners:

First Prize: Antivia

Antivia created a unique solution that was built on top of its current technologies that integrates SAP® BusinessObjects^TM Xcelsius® and Web Intelligence® functionalities to create a dashboard any business executive could envy. (See video demo here)

Runner-Up: Zementis

Zementis combined on-demand, high-performance processing for predictive algorithms through its Adaptive Decision and Predictive Analytics (ADAPA) scoring engine on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with the visualization capabilities in SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. In its demonstration, Zementis calculated and compared the average risk for each bank that sold loans to Freddie Mac between 2006-2009. (See video demo here)

Runner-Up: Ed Herman & Brian Dennett from Colgate-Palmolive

Colgate-Palmolive created an innovative, yet practical solution. The core is a reusable advanced business application programming (ABAP) API class that turns internal tables into new SAP BusinessObjects Explorer datasets. The solution also integrates with custom tables, list reports, master data management (MDM) for key performance indicators (KPI) reporting and an application that hooked directly into SAP NetWeaver® Master Data Management.

Runner-Up: Derek Papesch of Osaka, Japan

In this solution, the solver’s existing call-center software was only able to provide analytics in Microsoft Excel, which made it a very slow process and limited the ability to analyze high volumes of data. In response, they created Icicle – a small Java program that downloads the data, cleanses the data and uploads it to SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. With the application, the solver demonstrated how quickly it could find interesting trends and gain insight into where call-center improvements were needed. (See video demo here; password is “polestar”)

There were so many excellent submissions it was very difficult for the judging panel to just pick four.  Over the next few weeks I’m going to work together with a large number of the challenge solvers to highlight their solution on SDN to show off the truely amazing work all of them did.