In the first part of this blog, we discussed key elements of Mobile BI, options for delivering BI content on mobile devices and business scenarios best suited for mobile usage. Now let's talk about specifics from SAP in this area. I will cover various technology options from SAP, their use cases, device support and some future enhancements from SAP.
Continue reading " Mobile Business Intelligence - Part 2 " »
Continuing from my blog on BI 4.0 strategic direction on the reporting platform http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/2011/10/arrived_sap_business_intellige.html, I would now like to focus on the strategic direction being taken around data integration or Information Management (IM).
· Finding your place
When we talk about Information/Data Management we usually talk about 3-4 broad areas:
Continue reading " ARRIVED: SAP Business Intelligence 4.0- PART II " »
With significant new advancements in mobile technology and devices capabilities, coupled with growing importance of Business Intelligence (BI) within organizations, it is no surprise that Mobile BI is gaining so much attention. In the first part of this 2-part blog, I will discuss key elements of Mobile BI, options for delivering BI content on mobile devices and business scenarios best suited for mobile usage. In the next part, I will cover Mobile BI technology from SAP BusinessObjects perspective.
Continue reading " Mobile Business Intelligence - Part 1 " »
SAP's Business Intelligence product platform reached a critical milestone last month when the much awaited SAP BI 4.0 was made for General Availability (GA) on September 16th. Although the event was a bit muted and probably lost in the din and hype on HANA, it was definitely a corner stone in SAP's journey to transform its Business Intelligence bouquet. In this blog I would like to talk about the strategic direction that SAP is taking with this new platform both in terms of Business Intelligence (BI) and Information Management (IM). While in this blog I will provide my view points on the shape that BI is taking, I will be talking about aspects of IM in the subsequent blog.
Continue reading " ARRIVED: SAP Business Intelligence 4.0 -PART I " »
By Suresh Santhana
The ability to stay connected at all times and the ability to process data faster than ever has made Mobility and HANA the hottest topics in this year's Sapphire. At Infosys we leverage SAP's newest technologies to provide the best in class mobile solutions for our customers. At Sapphire Madrid we will showcase our Mobility capabilities and some of the smart apps like mBrochure, Guided Sales that we have built on devices like iPAD and smart phones.
This is the concluding part of my previous blog:
http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/2011/05/pricing_expert_system_-_blog_1.html#more
I will talk about the architecture and design elements of a decision-making pricing solution that meets the challenges highlighted in part 1.
Continue reading " BRF based Pricing Decision-making - Concluding part " »
In some of my previous blogs I have been trying to bring to fore some of pertinent questions and choices that our clients are facing in the Business Objects-BI space, there also certain similar dilemma that they are facing with certain choices in the Business Objects Enterprise-Information Management (EIM) area. One of the many questions that we face on a regular basis from our client is on whether to use the Business Objects-Data Federator(BO-DF) in a given scenario and the specific advantages of the tool as such.
Continue reading " Consolidation with a federation based approach- Is it really a way out? " »
By
Naresh Ramamurti
Practice Leader - SAP RETAIL
Customer Centricity and Cross-Channel shopping have been the two greatest trends in RETAIL since 2010. With Apple and Google taking the world's number 1 and 2 spots for global brands this year, these trends have taken a whole new meaning. On the foundation of tomorrow's mobile applications, customers have dynamited the way they interact with retailers - redefining and rewriting the shopper experience from product to point of sale. While organizations around the world continue to grapple with the challenges of reducing their cost of business, Retailers have an exceptional opportunity to take control of the shopping experience - from embracing social networks to crunching core analytics in real time.
While in my previous blog at http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/ I had discussed about the typical questions facing organizations looking at adopting Business Objects, I would now like to help provide a way forward towards navigating through those questions and challenges. Before we get into the details of the path forward let us take a peek into how BO version 4.0 compares with version 3.1 based on our experience in the beta testing phase that we had carried out last year.
Continue reading " Standing at the cross roads of the Business Objects journey-PART II " »
The Business Intelligence market has grown 13% in 2010, to surpass the 10 billion USD mark, it surely continues to be the top priority at most organizations!
BI, as a domain, has seen continuous evolution and marked with regular innovation cycles. So much so that, at times, it becomes difficult to keep pace with the upcoming trends. You may have just finished getting your implementation aligned with one, only to find that something better, that brings you even more business value is already up at the anvil. While this, at times, is a difficult position for the IS team, but considering the additional value that your business will be able to achieve, it is most important to ensure that you keep moving up the maturity curve and make the most of these innovations.
Numerous questions come to mind -
Keeping in mind the dilemma that we see most of our customers face, Infosys brings to you a panel discussion on this topic at the upcoming SAPPHIRE 2011 event at Orlando. We will have three industry experts, leading the BI strategy at three large and leading organizations, share with you their thoughts on the current BI trends, how they see the BI world changing and what they would like to see it transform into. They will also share their experiences and recommendations on how you can approach BI and its numerous innovations to help you build tomorrow's enterprise, today!
Be there to get answers to your questions!
2010 was a year of change, even turbulence, for SAP - particularly at the leadership level, with the replacement of CEO Leo Apotheker by co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hageman Snabe. The new leadership brought renewed confidence, which certainly showed in 2010 results. The bold acquisition of Sybase gave a position in mobility, the second largest business application growth topic behind SaaS.
In the last one month I came across the questions and predicament facing a couple of our global customers who were deliberating with the idea of implementing Business Objects on top of their SAP BW landscape.
Scenario-1:
A heavy engineering company is looking at rolling out SAP for its Customer and sales service functions across various service centers in mainland Europe. Along with its SAP ECC roll out it was looking at establishing its analytical platform utilizing SAP BW and Business Objects as the front end. It intends to start work the project from the next month. It is at a cross roads and trying to decide on whether it should go ahead with BO version 3.1 or go with the brand new version 4.0.
Scenario-2:
A large US based logistics company is already on a SAP BW BEx platform and had decided to migrate to a Business Objects reporting suite. It went ahead with performing a pilot of moving a few reports and dashboards to BO using version 3.1 and is now ready to launch the full program. However now it is trying to determine whether it should go ahead with the version 3.1 or move the pilot to version 4.0 and then perform the migration.
Both organizations are facing their moment of truth and am sure that they not in isolation. There would be many more corporations trying to navigate through this situation and making the best out of it. Let us try to understand the typical questions that are arising out of the situation:
· The first and foremost question running in the mind would be on whether BO 4.0 would be in General Availability within the next one month or would there be further delays?
· BO 4.0 promises to provide a much more seamless integration with SAP BW backend. Would the product be living up to its promise?
· Should I decide to go ahead with integrating BO3.1 with BW for now and decide to move to BO 4.0 or higher later, how much would be the migration efforts?
· Would SAP be protecting my investments on BO 3.1 and BW should I decide to go ahead with 3.1 or would I be again asked to move to 4.0 in the immediate future?
· Would I be better off waiting for a BO version 4.1 or higher?
I am sure there would be quite a few more that could as well be on the above list but I have tried to capture the most popular questions that we are facing with some of our clients who are looking at adopting BO in the immediate future.
Whereas there are no straight forward answers to the above questions we could definitely work out a strategic fit to decide on whether an organization should look at moving with 4.0 or start with 3.1.
In the subsequent blog I will try to delve into key differentiators of the two versions of Business Objects and the considerations that should drive the decision of choosing between them
As SAP is gearing up to make its new SAP BI 4.0 ready for General Availability in a few months from now, a lot of interest has been generated within the user as well as the analyst community on the capabilities that this new platform is going to offer. At Infosys we have had the opportunity of observing and testing the product while it was in its beta phase during middle to end of the last year. We have also now signed up with SAP for the ramp up phase and are currently evaluating the ramp up version of the product. I will be elaborating our point of view on the product based on our experience in the beta as well as the ramp up phases. At the same time I would like to mention that our testing of the BI 4.0 was on a SAP BW backend and the point of view would largely be keeping the BI 4.0 and SAP BW integration in the picture.
Continue reading " Where is SAP going with its Business Intelligence 4.0 product? " »
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud in simple words is 'Pay as you use'. Cloud computing is analogous to the way we pay for our utilities like electricity or water based on the consumption. The underlying Infrastructure is owned and managed by some third party and cost is billed to us in form of units consumed
I am back with the next blog on profitability analysis and activity based costing (ABC). For the benefit of new readers, I blog on profitability analysis and ABC and you can click here to view the previous blogs on related topics.
First of all, my sincere thanks for your comments on my previous blog - How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing? It's really good to get the views from practitioners. One common view in these comments is that the output of ABC system should be relevant and must assist in future decisions. I completely agree to this. It makes all the more important for the business to perform due diligence in identifying the right purpose and the right software for their ABC system. The other view is ABC hasn't translated from concept to practice for large number of companies. I believe this will change over time as the ABC software evolves further to deliver more value in terms of relevant and insightful information it provides at a lesser TCO.
Continue reading " Software evaluation for activity based costing systems (Part 1 of 2) " »
The concept 'Service Introduction' is gaining rapid popularity in IT world as an 'effective tool' to introduce a new application/service into an established system.
In short, Service Introduction is the management of activities to ensure that applications/systems being developed to meet all operational requirements before getting introduced to 'Production or Live' environment. It also has to ensure 'Maintenance teams' are comfortable in providing the required services from the day one.
While BI vendors have delivered significant improvements in product functionality, architecture and performance, they are yet to deliver significant functionality in new areas in line with business needs. Some of the areas include search based BI data discovery tools, support for collaborative decision making. Here, I will discuss what opportunities that are available for SAP to innovate and establish its leadership position in BI product market in view of current strengths of SAP products.
Continue reading " Contextual search and exploration: BO Explorer Accelerated " »
SAP acquired Business Objects in 2008 to provide customers with a full suite of business intelligence and information management solutions on a single platform with deep integration to SAP Business Suite and NetWeaver. The intent was to offer SAP customers with a market leading suite of reporting, analytics and dashboard capabilities. We have come a long way since then - on the ground SAP Business Intelligence (BI) customers are faced with multiple challenges like widening stack of products, evolving roadmaps, and frequently changing product names. In the below sections, we evaluate some essential steps of this evolution from a technical as well as business perspective.
Continue reading " SAP BW and Business Objects Integration : Part 1 " »
The recent global recession has forced many manufacturing companies to look into extreme cost cutting measures and liquidate their inventories. With the world now in a stage of economic recovery, consumers are opening their wallets again and are demanding more goods, leading to an increase in production output for manufacturing organizations. But rather than simply ramping up productivity, workforce and inventory levels to pre global recession levels, many manufacturers are first carefully investigating now how they can accommodate the increasing demand with their existing organization and production assets. After an era and years of industry wider restructuring, with increased globalization, mergers and acquisitions, many global organizations however now come to the rude awakening that their existing tools, structures, processes and data don't provide them the insights they are looking for to make sound strategic and operational decisions.
For someone who is being introduced to BO for the first time, the surfeit of tools and terminology can be overwhelming. Each of these tools has some unique features suited for specific scenarios, as well as overlapping features where more than one tool might serve the necessity. This is the first in a series of blogs where we look at the various tools from the Business Object suite, and the scenarios to which each is suited. The subsequent following blogs in the series will focus on specific tools.
Continue reading " BO Tool Fitment for Reporting Scenarios " »
Continue reading " Taking the “giant leap” into the world of Business Objects reporting on SAP " »
BO Explorer(prior name Polestar) is marketed by SAP more as an intiutive search tool and can be a google in the world of SAP BW.
Continue reading " Using the power of BW Accelerator with BO Explorer " »
If we take a look at the BI space today , BI has undergone an active market consolidation and the top BI vendors offer integrated suites which make the earlier ‘best of breed strategy’ more or less unconceivable. With so much of focus on integration, it is imperative that clients realize that the benefits of an integrated suite include a greatly simplified technical landscape, resulting in higher agility, faster speed to market and lower Total Cost of Ownership.
In today’s economic environment every organization realizes the need for planning various business functions and processes to achieve optimum results. The uncertainty of the future has made it mandatory to plan and simulate each of the scenarios business will be facing in time of credit crisis and falling demand levels.
A blog that highlights how a ‘Performance Measurement KPI Framework’ allows business executives to take a holistic view of strategic goals and link them appropriately to tactical and operational performance indicators.
Continue reading " Get a 360 degree view of your corporate strategy " »
A quick look on how BO fares on top of BI Accelerator enabled datamarts.
Continue reading " BO and BIA Combo - How does that look like ? " »
Continue reading " BI Accelerator for agility and profit " »
Coming to the last of the blog series on BI layers, this topic will also touch upon some popular analysis models used by data architects and analysts to develop and understand an enterprise data model.
Continue reading " Let's talk about BI Layers – Series 3 of 3 " »
In the earlier blog I covered the names of the various BI layers and the need for a logical model/data architecture in an enterprise data warehouse.Now let us get into the details.
Continue reading " Let's talk about BI Layers- Series 2 of 3 " »
To deliver effective Business Intelligence , organizations need to progressively design and implement a rugged data warehouse with the right enterprise data flow architecture and not to forget a logical data architecture.
Continue reading " Let's talk about BI layers - Series 1 of 3 " »
