SAP BI Innovations – Prepare for the Future – SAP EMEA Webcast

This was a webcast from SAP EMEA earlier this month.  As always anything in the future is subject to change and these are the notes as I heard them.  Also note this is only part of the webcast.

Another webcast is planned after the summer break.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Online retail has challenged and innovated

Digital unstable process to support one to one customer contacts

Landscape will change as quickly as we change

Speed change is visible, pressure of information, with “Apple style type of information” but infrastructure not support it, and lines of business create their own stores of information

It is a “customer led economy is now”

Figure 2:  Source: SAP

Require 3 different paths

You need a platform capabilities to apply services, with agility to your end users, and capability to predict what will happen tomorrow

Core services for big platform, with governed control over capabilities

Figure 3: Source: SAP

The platform has different services to support the business – predictive, analytic capability, access to transactions, spatial analytics and unstructured data

Core platform is BI4.1

IT needs to scale systems, to add more users, to “act faster” and agility to support more data sources, collaboration capabilities

Figure 4: Source: SAP

In June 1.5 was released, with a focus on performance.  Added interop with Lumira, improved printing, shared fragments, with offline on mobile devices, local calculations, catch up for Universes

Also added Geomap support in 1.5, with defaults based on OpenStreet map provider and you can use up to 10 map layers, can add custom shapes

For the future (see Figure 4) they plan to catch up with the Dashboards product including creating local calculations, improve universe support, and new visual components.  For the future they plan to improve offline versions on mobile devices

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Analysis Office 2.1 is in ramp-up

The plan for the future is for further integration/merging with EPM tool, improve PowerPoint capabilities and more formatting and configuration options and work on interoperability towards Lumira

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Web Intelligence is the most used BI tool with over 25K customers in production and will continue to invest in this tool

BI4.2 innovations planned are shown in Figure 6, including plan to add query parallelization to improve performance, and cascading input controls

Shared objects are planned so they are reusable with other reports; a shared object library

Plan to add annotations into reports

Improve reporting capabilities on HANA with a direct connection without a universe

SAP Speaker said “don’t say we’re not investing in Web Intelligence”

Figure 7: Source: SAP

For SAP Mobile BI, Plan to add Lumira content to Mobile BI – online and offline (Lumira Edge/BI Platform)

Future includes more support for Android to bring parity

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Figure 8 shows BI4.2 plans.

Universe authoring on BEx queries is planned for BI4.2

SAP wants to simplify upgrade including the patching process so downtime is down

SAP wants to introduce commentary solution

Further integration with BI platform, SAP plans to add Lumira and Design Studio to auditing capabilities

SAP plans to bring back linked universes

The rest of the session discussed Agility – this is covered in other blog posts

Question and Answer:

Q: you mentioned real time can you explain what it means?

A: at moment it happens want to see it in the analysis

Q: What are some Lumira vs Design Studio use cases

A: Lumira – explore, data discovery, create story board

Design Studio – dashboarding solution, guided analysis, predefined formatted trusted data source

Q: What is big data defined

A: loose term; more generic term towards huge amounts of data

For BI need to take unstructured and structured data and pull together

Reference:

Announcing ASUG SAP TechEd Pre-Conference Sessions – Open for Registration – includes an all day hands-on Design Studio session

Upcoming ASUG Business Intelligence Community W… | ASUG

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio Training – Basic and Advanced