SAP

With Business Intelligence (BI) emerging as a critical success factor for business users, access to information alone is no longer enough. Organizations have been using BI for many years to monitor, report on, analyze, and improve the performance of their business operations. The focus of strategic technology leaders is to create solutions that can be integrated seamlessly across the IT landscape making them globally visible. In the flattening world, it is critical for companies to maximize application usage, better assimilate operational data, leverage real time data analytics for enhanced operational efficiency, and extract value from information for competitive advantage.

SAP’s NetWeaver BI suite helps enable organizations to create and operate a data warehouse in an enterprise-wide environment. Facilitating the integration of heterogeneous systems, it supports various system topologies and enables both strategic analysis and operational reporting.
In the past, SAP-BI implementations have often taken a module-centric approach with underlying challenges due to project-driven solutions, heterogeneous architectures, unmanaged business rule redundancies, uncontrolled data flow, and bottom-up/top-down approaches. The result was high development and maintenance costs. This created a compelling need for an integrated enterprise-wide data warehouse to ensure a ‘single version of the truth’ with assured scalability and efficient query response.

Current business demands require processing very large amounts of data to generate relevant analytical reports. Usually OLAP cache, RDBMS aggregates and pre-calculated queries are used to improve query performance. When data volumes increase and query navigation becomes sophisticated, it becomes challenging to provide consistently good query performance. Businesses are challenged by the need for large volumes of data, response time service level agreements and unpredictable query navigation.

The BIA Appliance can benefit businesses that have high volumes of data. The read performance of queries can be greatly improved using the BIA Appliance. This new tool helps enable quick access to any data with a low amount of administrative effort and is especially useful for sophisticated scenarios with unpredictable query types, high data volumes and high frequency of queries. BIA is also useful when aggregates or database indexes are not sufficient, or when these methods become too costly to maintain.