The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

Here’s a roundup of all the latest analytics news from SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid on subjects including SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA, collaborative analytics, new mobile applications, updated analytic applications, and more. You can get more information on all of these at the SAPPHIRE NOW campuses.

SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA. SAP announced today more information about SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse running on SAP HANA. The platform now has both business function libraries and predictive analysis libraries incorporated to dramatically improve performance. Business functions such as sales forecasting based on linear regression, seasonal adjustments or other business-defined factors are available as reusable functions directly in memory. Business users can also utilize advanced data mining and statistical algorithms, such as decision trees, to analyze the most critical factors that influence customer purchase decisions. A new information composer tool for SAP HANA enables business users to upload data simply into SAP HANA using a spreadsheet or by cutting and pasting from a clipboard to create new analyses that blend private data with centrally published data. Finally, there have been further improvements in enterprise reliability, availability, stability and performance of SAP HANA. Fully automated backup, including point-in-time recovery is now available. Data-loading performance has also been accelerated by enabling extract-transform-and-load activities directly in the in-memory layer. SAP HANA is also integrated with the SAP Solution Manager, SAP NetWeaver Identify Management and SAP BusinessObjects Access Control.

You can now visit the Experience SAP HANA website to try out demos of the product, and request your own access to the system. There are lots of sessions available on SAP HANA at SAPPHIRE NOW from  Madrid, and you can visit the test-drive SAP HANA area, or read about how SAP is using SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA internally. You can see more information about the future SP3 version of SAP HANA in the What’s New documentation, or in the other documentation available. You can read why one SAP partner thinks it’s going to be a runaway success. In particular, it includes the information composer tool for SAP HANA, a Web-based environment which allows non-technical business users to upload data to the SAP HANA database and to manipulate that data by creating Information Views. You can see a preview video here, and read the documentation.

Collaborative Analytics. SAP announced today forthcoming on-demand analytic capabilities for the SAP StreamWork collaborative decision-making application. The types of analytic functionality currently available in SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand are now directly in SAP StreamWork, including accessing information stored in SAP HANA, resulting in rapid retrieval and analysis of data necessary for business-critical decisions. SAP StreamWork can also be integrated directly with the SAP BusinessObjects BI launchpad, letting people collaborate from directly within their analytic environment.

New Mobile Applications. New mobile apps from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio help people across organizations incorporate business analytics into their day-to-day work on a variety of devices. Available on the Apple Apps Store, SAP BusinessObjects Mobile provides instant access to favorite business intelligence reports, metrics and real-time business data. In addition, the SAP Strategy Management mobile app, also available on iTunes, enables executives to collaborate on key initiatives while away from the office. New mobile governance, risk and compliance (GRC) apps are also available. The SAP GRC Access Approver mobile app facilitates review, time-sensitive approvals and operation-critical access requests for managers and the SAP GRC Policy Survey mobile app lets sales managers can keep track of the latest policy changes within their organization and complete policy-related surveys. For more information on how mobilizing employees can empower them on-the-go, see SAP and Sybase Launch Next Wave of Mobile Apps That Transform Key Industries and Lines of Business.

New and updated Analytic Applications. New SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications are available:

• Now generally available, the 3.0 release of the SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management analytic application, the SAP BusinessObjects Data Enrichment and Classification OnDemand solution and Supplier InfoNet solution help customers identify opportunities in which they can save money, improve the reliability of their data and set KPIs to become more effective and efficient in their overall procurement performance.
• SAP BusinessObjects Supply Chain Performance Management helps customers target specific Supply Chain and manufacturing needs by providing improved visibility, focusing on metrics, synchronizing demand and supply and improving supply chain risk management.
• With SAP BusinessObjects Sales and Operations Planning, companies can optimize asset performance and reduce cost with capabilities that help improve planning, forecasting and continuous monitoring of assets.
• Additionally, the new SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution for analytics provides sales, service and marketing teams a holistic view across organization to make fact-based decisions with integrated customer insights. Rapid-deployment solutions from SAP are comprised of fixed-price, predefined software that helps customers target specific business issues quickly and affordably.

SAP Customer Segmentation Accelerator. This new application combines the power of SAP HANA with SAP Customer Relationship Management. It allows marketing departments to analyze and segment in ways that were previously unimaginable, with highly specific segmentations on high volumes of granular customer data. It lets companies better understand customer demand, behavior and preferences and target the right customers with the right offers across every segment, tactic and channel. empowers. This accelerator will also be delivered as a rapid-deployment solution.

Other Recent News you may have missed:

General Availability of the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects BI and EIM solutions. SAP recently announced the global general availability of the 4.0 releases of business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, including the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software. The solutions represent the future of analytics with real-time, mobile and social capabilities to help organizations better understand their businesses and make confident, data-driven decisions.

Roadmap for feature pack 3 for the 4.0 release. The analytics team posted an update to the SAP BusinessObjects roadmap with the high-level features of feature pack 3

Enterprise Information Management. SAP has been positioned by Gartner Inc. in the leaders quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration (DI) Tools” report. The 4.0 release of enterprise information management (EIM) solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio brings together structured and unstructured data across the enterprise. In particular, the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services includes new information governance in the form of SAP BusinessObjects Information Steward, which helps solve one of the biggest issues facing organizations today: how to get business people and system owners to collaborate together to improve data quality.

On-Demand Business Intelligence. A new “powered by SAP HANA“ option is available for SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, enabling complex analyses, plans and simulations on real-time data as part of an on-demand platform.

Collaborative Decision Making. SAP’s cloud-based collaborative decision application, SAP StreamWork, was recognized in Gartner Inc.’s first collaborative decision-making (CDM) vendor profile, “Who’s Who in Collaborative Decision Making“. SAP StreamWork brings order to chaos by uniting people, information and structured business tools for closer collaboration and improved productivity. The application gives people friendly tools for structuring and tracking conversations, documents, data and decisions for future reference. Notifications, activity streams and action items keep everyone in the loop.

SAP and Google Maps. SAP and Google signed a partnership this summer. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can try out Augmented Reality with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer today. Take a look at this Pervasive Location Analytics presentation for some great examples.