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

Comments

[sap support packs]

Hi! just wanted to thank you for this one... your insights about the software were truly helpful.. I wish you all the best :)