BI 2013 – It’s a Wrap…Part 1

[TammyPowlas]

BI 2013 finished yesterday and it was a great experience.  First I learned that this is the 11th year for both BI 2013 and Financials 2013, which were co-located with GRC and Admin 2013.  This resulted in over 3000 attendees at the MGM Hotel in Las Vegas.

What is BI 2013? The site says “the most important event of the year for professionals that use and support SAP solutions for reporting, business intelligence, and data management. The schedule includes in-depth sessions, networking events, and demos showcasing the latest updates and best practices for SAP business intelligence solutions.”

I missed last year’s jump start sessions so this year I planned on making it.  The first pre-conference session I attended was "Lessons for preparing, deploying, and optimizing SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 SP5 and a sneak peek at what's coming with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1" with SAP's ingo.hilgefort (SAP Mentor) and ty.miller

Note below that I am only sharing very brief highlights of this three hour session.   You can find some updates in this tweetdoc: http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/67514/BI2013

Since this talks about future functionality, the usual disclaimer applies that things are subject to change.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Ty reviewed the toolsets and some BI platform enhancements shown in Figure 1.  He also reviewed the purpose of each tool

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 shows BI4.1 enhancements coming to Analysis for OLAP.  Overall at this conference there was a big interest/attendance at all of the Analysis Sessions, especially the two BI 2013 Analysis hands-on sessions given by Ingo Hilgefort.

Some Question & Answer at the end of this session:

Q: Do you have to have Hana for Predictive? 

A: No, it leverages BI platform – universes, Excel & direct to database

Q: Does it (predictive) connect to BWA?

A: No; you can get this through HANA

Q: When will Design Studio catch up to XCelisius

A:  Over the next few years;  at the end of year, Design Studio will connect to universes.  BI 4.1 will have additional features for Dashboards Mobile including offline dashboards

At the end, Ty and Ingo stayed afterwards for 40+ minutes to answer questions - see below:

The above picture shows Ingo Hilgefort on the left with attendee/customer naveen.ketha - they were having an active discussion about BW on Hana.

In my next blog I will give some highlights to the second pre-conference session I attended.

I want to thank the SAP Insider/WisPubs team, especially Bridget Kotelly, Scott Wallask, and Graceanne Bowe, along with speakers Ty Miller and Ingo Hilgefort.

If you missed BI 2013 you can “catch up” and attend the BI4 Elite training or join us May 13^th at ASUG’s Annual Conference Pre-Conference session,  BI4.1 hands-on tools in a day – register here.