SAP

 I believe that if SAP has to establish its leadership position in BI market then it needs to focus on innovation. In my opinion, the key areas where SAP can provide innovation is by leveraging existing strengths and the areas are below. These are also the areas where customers are looking for improved functionality and innovation to meet their business needs.

Visualization and search based BI data discovery tools - As BI usage will shift from analysis to decision making and also to predictive analysis, the visualization and BI data discovery tools will provide significant value to customers. While Xcelcius dashboards, search engines using enterprise portal, Business objects explorer address these need to an extent, integration and flexibility is limited. Also, customization efforts and complexity to implement is high resulting in customers not utilizing delivered functionality to fullest extent. If SAP is able to provide flexible and ready to implement functionality, customer will be greatly benefited. Another important factor would be to provide ability to process large data with adequate performance while processing information.

Support for Collaborative Decision Making -  SAP business objects has a On-Demand Solutions in this area. The functionality and scalability seems limited from the information available. If SAP can provide robust functionality and leverage demand in this area, SAP can certainly take lead in this area.

Alert Based Reporting - Over last several years, analytics has been developed to monitor business performance. While this has provided good information in taking business decisions, the onus is still on business users to review the data/information. In the age of information overload, it is becoming increasing important to deliver alerts that would help in taking decisions rather than having to go through lot of data/reports. This 'exception management' will be extremely useful to deliver business value. Although, information broadcasting framework combined with exception management can deliver this capability, the functionality available is limited and complex scenarios require lot of customization. I believe SAP can improve functionality in this area to provide significant business value.

Real Time Data Access -  SAP content extractors have saved huge customization efforts and cost for customers. However, SAP business content extractors do not easily allow for  real time or near real time data acquisition in BW and reporting. Many of the business content extractors require multiple steps for extraction, performance issues due to overlapping delta and recoverability is low in case of errors. SAP can actively look at push mechanism to support this functionality which would ensure optimal use of resources as well as provide required functionality. The current design of SAP extractors can be extended to provide this functionality.

To summarize, I believe SAP has provided significant improvements in BI/EPM area in the last few years. However, lack of clarity on roadmap coupled with high customization efforts have resulted in customers not leveraging the functionality. I believe that SAP can establish edge over other BI product vendors by delivering innovation in business critical areas where currently functionality is lacking and brining in ready to implement solutions that do not require high customization efforts. The best way to do so is by leveraging strengths in the existing product stack.