CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

Systems of Engagement - The Killer App - In Memory + Mobility

Attended the SAP BI4 launch / SAP Run better today event at NYC. Lots of interesting content. Always fun to start with the “Killer App”.

This is the second time @nstevenlucas mentioned that the killer app is "In memory" combined with "Mobility". It does sound like a very potent combination, its important not to look at it just from the lens of "analytics" but more generally in terms of enablement of business process or mobile enabled business process applications that can be built on an in-memory platform.

Lets for a minute forget the coolness of being able to look at data on the phone or iPad but lets go beyond that , we will need to rethink the way we approach the business processes as a whole in light of how enablement provided by these underlying capabilities. I like the verbage provided by Geoffrey Moore during the keynote at the SAP Better Run event today, about enterprise IT needing to thinking in terms of systems of engagement not just systems of record.

So lets take a minute do understand what Geoffrey Moore meant by systems of engagement:

Systems of Engagement are:

1. Collaborative
2. Interaction oriented
3. User experience centric
4. System learns the user
5. Cool and Groove

As he said, every strategy there are some key make or break moment's, its important to understand who represents the company at these moments and how they can be enabled to be successful in those moments. There is now a need for apps that need to be visualized and built on this killer foundation of "In memory" & "mobility" to address these very moments of engagement.

Prashanth Rai

SAP Business Analytics 4.0

Today I attended a deep dive session on SAP business analytics 4.0, the official launch is tomorrow. SAP clearly see’s this release as a big leap for their business intelligence portfolio but I think they see it as “big leap” for the business intelligence space in general.

The four key themes for this release are:

• Big data in real-time
• Insight with confidence across business and social data
• Instant, Powerful BI in your hands - Mobile BI
• The best fit, right size, right now

Have covered some of the details of this release in an earlier post based on a briefing by Steve Lucas (GM Business Analytics ) SAP.

Some interesting bits from todays session:

1. 1 Million Person days investment made for this release
2. BI 4 – Is a new release after 3 years – Lot of customer interest.
3. Close to 30 customers in ramp-up
4. Both the co-CEO's of SAP had iPads with the SAP Business Object Explorer app which has access to the full CRM data of SAP loaded up onto the "in-memory" platform. This usage pattern has had a trickle down impact across the organization both in terms of usage of the system and user behavior.
5. In Memory – HANA - 5x faster on SAP BW
6. 13000 SAP customers have SAP BW implemented
7. Hana’s licensing is based on the size of usage - Extra small package will be available for SMEs

One of the key aspects of this release is the “In Memory” aspect, with this regard SAP has put together a 3 x 3 matrix on what is the best approach to “in memory” or “Acceleration” for customers based on their respective application environments:

Application Environment	Acceleration Technology	Business Intelligence Solution
SAP ERP (4.6c or later)	Go directly to HANA	SAP Business Object BI
SAP Netweaver BW	SAP Netweaver BW Accelerator	SAP Business Objects Explorer
Non SAP analytics / data	Sybase IQ	SAP Business Object BI

Another area that is going to be interesting to track / watch is Analytic applications , these are apps that are going to be built on the In-memory platform/HANA. Looks like the SAP BPC solution is also likely to go down this path being built / deployed on the in-memory platform (HANA).

Prashanth Rai

Image Source: 1

SaaS BI / BI On Demand ….State of Affairs–Part 1

BI On Demand / SaaS BI is a great way particularly for small and medium size companies to get the low hanging fruits of business analysis/reporting without spending a huge amount of money and IT effort. This gets companies started down the path of Business analytics within a couple of weeks.I think it is flawed to think that this model makes more sense primarily if the data sources are “SaaS” based but I think even for on premise data sources, leveraging SaaS based BI can help companies start down the path of business analytics without needing to put together a whole BI competency center, which most SME’s are not going to be in a position to do that anytime in the near future.

The tools are quite powerful and cater to many relevant use cases at companies particularly SME companies. There are quite of few solutions out there in this domain, will look through them over the next couple of days. Lets start with SAP BI On demand, Recently was trying out the solution and liked quite a few things about it. The approach to this solution seemed to be report sharing solution to external stakeholders like salesperson, customers , distributors etc. But it can be lot more than that particularly for SME’s.

The one thing I really liked about the SAP Bi On demand solution was the iPhone app – SAP Business Object explorer.It provides some nice visualizations for the data that is loaded into the on-demand warehouse right on my mobile phone.

I was able to get some data from an ERP load it up into a personal account and get the data on my iPhone in a matter of an hour (of course there are some restrictions on the size of data in these personal accounts). But I think it was pretty neat say to be able to deliver analytics / reports to a complete sales force with a couple of days efforts.

Below is a video testimonial for SAP BI on demand

SAP BI On Demand Case Study

More on SAP BI on demand to follow, Want to see when we are going to see the impact or benefits of SAP's business analytics 4 solution launch ( in the next couple of days).

But I think we are going to see a lot of innovation from the SaaS BI / BI ondemand space trickle back down into , On Premise solutions. I like what I am reading from companies like Chart.io

data visualization will still help uncover important nuances. Maybe not all, but you’ll discover lots of useful insights and be guided toward the relevant next steps for analysis.

, Excel is horrible for developing data insights. Avoid it. It’s simply not good at all for discovery. I see data visualization, instead, as being key for the first steps. So if you’re running a business and you’re not asking “Where are the data visualizations?” then you’re doing something wrong.

More to follow….

Prashanth Rai

Cloudspokes

Was just checking out the Cloudspokes initiative of Appirio, I think it’s a pretty interesting initiative and could have an additional benefit for Appirio – Good talent pool for recruitment.

At first thought Cloudspokes is an interesting merging of two concepts that SAP has implemented the SDN & the Ecohub. I remember asking Henning Kaggermann (when he was the CEO) if they(SAP) had any plans of including a marketplace into SDN given the successful traction / developer involvement.

What is CloudSpokes?

a new crowdsourcing development community and marketplace that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of cloud experts. It is the only community focused solely on multi-tenant public cloud platforms and applications, and the projects, topics and skills related to these different platforms.

How does Cloudspokes work?

• Companies who need cloud development work can sponsor a challenge on CloudSpokes, giving developers a way to earn cash rewards, test and prove their skills for badges and other recognition.
• Challenges appear on a list visible to all developer members, along with the award amount and pre-defined success criteria so all participants are aware of how they’ll be judged.
• Submissions are scored by a peer review board and awarded to the best submission. Those participating in the challenge can then see other submissions and learn from their peers.
• The developer members’ public profile is updated to include challenge history, recommendations, and badges to build their profile inside the community and among potential employers.

Appirio is committing $1 million in contest funding to help seed the initiative.

Will need to wait and see what kind of traction / developer / customer involvement its able to generate/ garner.

Check out this Video explaining – Cloudspokes

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Prashanth Rai

SAP Business Analytics Release 4.0 Pre-briefing

Earlier this week attended the SAP Business Analytics Release 4.0 Pre-briefing by Steve Lucas (GM Business Analytics ) SAP, below are some notes from the meeting:

Key focus of release 4 is the integration of the areas of Business intelligence & EIM. SAP has been working on this for the last 3 years. This whole thing is developed post acquisition under the SAP roof.

Steve Lucas an former BO employee indicated that he was very impressed by the Quality & Process rigor followed in development within SAP.

The vision of this release was to look at What the customers need the most? - The hardest things to do for customers ? and deal with them head on, Though it has taken longer to get the release out of the door, it has Substantial value.
   
Business Analytics / Intelligence was an key area since SAP 2009 ,2010 has seen explosive growth - 50% of SAP license revenue came from the business analytics space in North America. SAP analytics business had more license revenue Q4 of 2010 than most competitors did in the whole year. They have also setup a dedicated non billable team called "Customer success team" - Focused on delighting the customer with their use of SAP Business Analytics.

2011 - Is expected to be the most significant in their history.

Trends to watch for in this space:

• Mobility (Explore on IPAD etc, stuff on the play book)
• Data Challenge (BI hasn't kept pace with growth of information - too many layers to implement given the enormity of data - SAP addressing it differently with In-Memory stuff like HANA etc - dealing with 100's of billions of records)

What's most exciting in 4.0 (Differentiating / Customer asking for)

Key:

• Information Steward - All about trusted information - Driving information governance / process.
• Event Insight - Collect process and manage events that integrate with your BI / Analytics system
• Mobility - wherever / whenever - broader set of capability (other devices - committed across all platforms)
• In Memory - The killer app , particularly when paired with mobility. Mobility wont work if it takes forever to get the "information"

Others:

• Overall UI improvement - Each of the tools separate - UI standardized across client technology.
• Specifically for SAP ERP customers - Brand new way to access the SAP backend (BICS) - 2/3 times faster then anything else our there.
• BI / EIM integrated - Deep user / date integration - in scenarios like multi source universe creation
• 64 bit / virtualization / support for deployment on AWS (specifically for mid sized / small customers)

Social BI

• Look at Streamwork (SaaS solution) integrates with BI - Key indicator of where SAP is going - Information sharing / Collaboration - primarily integration around data
• Broad data integration capabilities like FB / Twitter etc. (Sentiment analysis) / Data spun off from Social

Goto market

• Evenly across customers that have SAP as their ERP & more agonistic customers. Absolutely laser like focused to bring the best BI/EIM solution for all customers not just SAP ERP customer.
• Leverage SAP Industries expertise / Business insight - Best run intimacy will be leveraged.

Prashanth Rai

Business Objects Release 4 “Event Insight”–The key differentiator.

Today i attended a pre-launch briefing by Steve Lucas (GM Business Analytics) of SAP regarding the Business Objects release 4 (Official Launch planned later this month). There was a lot of interesting content which will be the focus of another post. In this post i want to focus on one statement that Steve made that i thought was very interesting.

Steve indicated that Event Insight is one of the most exciting / differentiating factors in this new release of SAP.

Looks like SAP is definitely onto something here - The combination Event Insight, In Memory & mobility will be a real game changer.

It would be really interesting to see how SAP allows third party developers to develop / deploy mobile applications leveraging these 3 areas. Maybe SAP could create its own "Mobile App store" allowing third party developers could deploy a wide range of "enterprise" mobility applications leveraging the "foundations" that SAP puts in place with "Event Insight" + "In Memory" + "Mobility" platform.

What is Event Insight?

The goal of Event Insight is to provide real-time monitoring of business events:

• Detect meaningful business events and new opportunities, such as customer buying behavior, through historical and current events
• Send alerts to business users, letting them detect and react to business changes before adverse events happen
• Easily set up the agents, on multiple data sources, monitoring both structured and unstructured data, without programming

Event Insight uses technology that was first developed for high-velocity, high-transaction trades on Wall Street, but has now been extended and adapted for use in BI. The biggest difference is in the nature of the processing: compared to previous “monolithic”  CEP implementations, business intelligence typically requires more data sources, with processing shared among nodes on the network. 
    
Source: Timo Elliot

Prashanth Rai