Webinar Summary – Right-Sizing SAP BusinessObjects for Your Next Step

On Thursday, January 21, 2021, APOS held a webinar in which we examined the steps you can take to prepare for what comes next with your SAP BusinessObjects deployment, whatever that next step might be.

You can view the webinar on demand here.

Right-sizing SAP BusinessObjects for your next move depends, of course, on what your next move is, but in general, you will want to look at ways to:

• Rationalize
• Reduce
• Restructure

Getting everything “just right” is not just a worthy technological goal, but also one that can be seen in culture, as illustrated by the Goldilocks fairy tale. That fairy tale has also been used by astrophysicists to describe the zone (the “Goldilocks zone) in our solar system in which habitable planets can form.

For your organization, next steps could be:

• Upgrade/Migration
• Move to Cloud server deployment
• Consolidation of deployments
• Expanding to SAP Analytics Cloud
• Corporate restructuring
• Corporate merger or acquisition
• Hardware infrastructure upgrade
• Moving use cases to another BI platform
• Expanding to more business units

Regardless of whether you are up-sizing or down-sizing, the objective is to find the right size for your deployment.

You can find the right size for your deployment in 3 steps.

Rationalizing consists of assessing what necessary and what is not, specifically with regard to content, users, licenses, and infrastructure.

To come to an understanding of what content is and isn’t necessary, you need to audit your system to find out what is there, what is being used, and which schedules and instances are no longer relevant. You will also want a catalog of your universes, and to know which are active and which are not active.

You will want to take stock of your users and groups as well. Are there users who have moved on to SAP Analytics Cloud and no longer need to log in to SAP BusinessObjects? Can you reduce the number of groups through consolidation?

You will want to know whether your SAP BusinessObjects servers are being under-utilized or over-utilized to decide whether changes to infrastructure are necessary.

And you will want to know user activity patterns to make licensing decisions.

Discovering these details of your deployment will be much easier if you use an auditing and monitoring solution such as APOS Insight, and the webinar goes on to describe how this particular solution can help.

The next aspect of right-sizing that the webinar covers is reducing the footprint of your SAP BusinessObjects deployment. Even if you are not down-sizing, you can still reduce this footprint by finding and removing unnecessary content and users.

You could delete content and users manually, but you would also have to identify each unnecessary report, instance and user manually. However, the potential for human error in manually identifying and deleting content and users is immense, which is why an automated cleanup solution is recommended.

Using APOS Insight and APOS Storage Center together can provide an automated cleanup solution that allows you to identify what isn’t needed, archive it, delete it from your system, and provide selective restore functionality to restore objects and instances selectively if needed.

Depending on whether you are up-sizing or down-sizing, the Restructure step in the right-sizing process may involve:

• Scaling down due to reduced users
• Scaling down due to reduced content
• Scaling down due to reduced usage from past consumption levels
• Scaling down due to lower usage than original expectations

Or:

• Scaling up due to increased users
• Scaling up due to increased content
• Scaling up due to old hardware
• Scaling up due to move to cloud deployed BOBJ
• Scaling up due to more scheduling
• Scaling up due to revised licensing method

If you are scaling down because you are moving users and content to SAP Analytics Cloud, you are in the perfect position to take advantage of SAP’s Cloud Extension policy, as detailed by Andrew Fox here.

Note: In collaboration with the SAP Analytics Center of Excellence, APOS has developed the BI on BI application to deliver a system scan and analysis service designed to provide SAP BusinessObjects customers with a snapshot of their BI deployment, answering questions such as:

• What is the activity level on my BusinessObjects system?
• How have activity levels been changing?
• Who are my most active users?
• What reports in my system are used most?
• What is the makeup of the BI content in my system?

This is a no-fee service which gives a high level view of key BI system metrics that will allow a better understanding of the BI deployment to assist with BI transition discussions and next step deployment planning with your account.

For system right-sizing scenarios and more detailed analysis requirements, APOS provides enhanced system analysis capabilities that the customer can adopt.

For more information, contact your APOS account manager, or make a solution inquiry.