By Robert Mick, ARC Advisory Group
SAP Customers Seeking Clarity
At the recent Sapphire-2009 conference, one of SAP’s big user events, SAP reported that its customers around the globe were expressing a desire for business clarity. This motivated SAP to make business clarity the overarching theme for the keynotes at Sapphire. The end result was an SAP story about business intelligence and analytics, supported by updates about several other SAP initiatives.
This does not mean that SAP is now charting a completely new path. On the contrary, as I learned in discussions with SAP executives, the other programs, such as the Value Scenario effort, are still alive and pressing forward. But, it does mean that you will be hearing a lot more from SAP – the business process company – about information, intelligence and analytics.
Business Intelligence and Analytics Headline at Sapphire
SAP’s theme, “Clear Enterprise,” makes it easy to highlight the benefits of the company’s SAP BusinessObjects offerings. Of course, this is positioning, but intelligence and analytics have been coming up more frequently in ARC engagements for all business domains – customer management, supplier management, logistics, operations, etc.
Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI) as an enterprise solution and market segment has, for the most part, addressed the need of relatively narrow class of end users, the business analyst, but that focus is broadening rapidly. Now, we frequently see interest in embedding intelligence and analytics into environments for a broader set of roles. For example, at Sapphire, SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Software, with a user interface (UI) designed for low-tech users.
Simplifying the user interface is a significant step forward for SAP, but if you adopt it in your business, you will still need your IT staff to cleanse the data and load it into SAP BW for Explorer to use. SAP BusinessObjects Software, in general, will continue to support non-SAP information stores, and that will be the case for Explorer.
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