While there were a number of press releases this week at SAPPHIRE, today's press conference was dominated by the announcement of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is a "self-service, search-driven, and discovery-friendly solution" that allows business users (yes, even a CEO) to interact with enterprise data. When combined with the in-memory technologies of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator (BWA), business users can explore very large volumes of data at the "speed of thought". Perhaps the most powerful part of the press conference was the testimonials from Sara Lee and Molson Coors who have been using a Beta version of product. Both reported incredible response times; sub-second on 300 million records at Sara Lee and 2.3 seconds on 900 million records at Molson Coors. End-users love the application, pleading with the executive sponsor not to take it away.
Not surprisingly, return on investment (ROI) came up. Here too, the praise was overwhelming. Molson Coors suggested that it had "changed their lives" by eliminating performance tuning of their Business Warehouse. Both companies cited weeks or small numbers of months to show the value.
For many things, seeing is believing, but I don't think watching a demo coveys the power of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. I think you need to experience it for yourself. One way to do so is to try out the microfinance demo at http://microfinance.sap.com/. You can learn more about the product and how microfinance is helping reduce global poverty.
