Having the responsibility of supporting the 60,000 employees of SAP and putting « SAP Runs SAP » as a fundamental baseline of our strategy and all of our decisions, SAP Global IT has been one of the first adopters of the Business Intelligence suite of SAP to deliver solutions and empower all Lines of Business for many years now.
Being part of this exciting story where we continue offering new opportunities and additional value to our end users, my intention in this blog is to share some of the major trends we foresee this year in our strategy – a very exciting year!
SAP BusinessObjects Platform: turnover in our history
Our classic Business Intelligence world is turning a new page at the beginning of this year. Having rolled out our first solutions on SAP BusinessObjects
Platform BI 4.0 when it was in a ramp up phase in 2011, we are about to close our SAP BusinessObjects Platform BOE XI3.1 after the last successful migration of the most critical solutions. Our SAP BusinessObjects Platform BI 4.0 platform will become BI 4.1, which we want to move as early as possible to take the benefit of the upcoming enhancements and optimizations.
Mobility : keep the momentum
As part of our Business Intelligence strategy, any solution we deliver to our internal Business users must be available on laptop and on Mobile devices. The continuous enhancement of the SAP Mobile Analytics Applications since last year (SAP BI Mobile and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Mobile) has considerably fostered the adoption of our solutions, reaching a new audience of Executives and casual users. Key words are : direct access and great, simple User Experience. We expect this year to keep up the same momentum with the following 3 main points:
- Moving toward one single Mobile Application for all SAP Analytics Front End tools – making the BI content accessible from one single entry on their mobile device and leaving the End Users with the need to know which tool they are using.
- Supporting the main types of devices (IOS, Android, Windows 😎 with the same level of functionality.
- Keep enhancing the Application with new functionality and the best User Experience!
Dashboarding : a smooth transition, the right solution for the need
Dashboarding as always remains a key topic. In November 2012, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.0 was released with a first focus to SAP Netweaver sources, where we were using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius). Our plan is to proceed with a smooth transition, along with the Product roadmap and long term direction to Design Studio:
- Invest massively on SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio for all new requests where the data source is SAP Netweaver
- Continue investing on SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards for non SAP BW sources and/or enhancing the existing solutions with the new Mobile enablement (HTML5).
Data Discovery and Exploration : the End To End solution
In 2012, with the rollout of SAP Visual Intelligence, we have been very happy to offer our Business Community a new solution to self-acquire data, transform them, and highlight meaningful information with great visualization, with SAP Visual Intelligence. The speed of initial adoption has been very good,
and we expect the transformation to happen with the further development of this tool in a number of ways:
- In: enhanced data integration/manipulationfeatures, and lifecycle management.
- Out: enhanced integration with the online and mobile tools of the Data Discovery and Exploration suite.
Thinking beyond 2013…
As always, we are eager to collaborate with the Development Organization of SAP to co-innovate with the joint objective to always offer new capability to our Business Users based on new technology and new integrations. Looking at the exponential growth of deployments using SAP HANA, the incredible speed of Mobile offerings, and the very fast emergence of Cloud solutions, Business Intelligence has an amazing opportunity to turn all these technologies into a strong Business value to make fast decisions from any source of data, anywhere, and at any time. My strongest desire is to contribute to these fundamental Innovations!
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