SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando was packed with examples of how Big Data affects all our lives.

SAP Executive Steve Lucas was the host of an Intel-sponsored Big Data special interest group meeting at the conference. He kicked off the session by explaining that he considers himself to be an example of the human face of new data technologies. As a type 1 Diabetic, he wears a device that measures his blood sugar once a second, and communicates it to a hand-held device that he uses to constantly monitor his diet and take control of his health:

“For a diabetic, you literally are the living embodiment of data because you spend most of your spare time during your day checking and monitoring your blood sugar number.”

Rick Smolen, a former Time Life journalist and photographer, spoke at the event and during a panel the next day.

After working on various projects including the very successful “Day in the Life” series of books, Rick’s most recent book (and accompanying interactive iPad application) is called The Human Face of Big Data, and it’s full of compelling stories of how new data technologies are making a difference.

Rick explained that Marissa Meyer, now CEO of Yahoo, helped draw him to the project when she described technology as “helping the planet develop a nervous system.” In other words, by aggregating all of the sensors, searches and transactions in the world, it gives us a sense of what’s happening in the planet in real time.

In his forward to the book, Rick says:

“On the following pages, as you meet the men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution, I suspect you will come to the same conclusion that I have: Big Data may well turn out to be the most powerful tool set the human race has ever had to address the widespread challenges facing our species and our planet”

Rick believes that big data will change our lives – and not just in the business world. “Healthcare is at the top of the list” he explained. Today, as drug companies do clinical trials, they may find that it can help 99% of patients, but harm a small percentage, so could never get approved by the FDA. But the price of genome decoding is plummeting, holding out the promise of personalized medicine, prescriptions based on what is effective for your particular DNA. “Today, the cures exist, but they are sitting on the shelves” said Rick “today, antibiotics is one size fits all. The whole work is going to change thanks to medicine designed to treat the individual.”

Sensors will also result in new opportunities. “For example, 14 seconds before the recent massive earthquake in Japan, every bullet train and every factory came to a halt” said Rick. “Because the country had prepared a hardwired sensor system to detect the wave that comes before the violent one”.  That required a huge upfront capital investment. In silicon valley, a group of researchers realized that every modern laptop has sensors to protect their hard drives: if you drop the computer, it lifts the head off the platter to try to save the spinning disk. So they created the Quake Catcher Network, that allows crowd-sourced earthquake detection around the world. You download the free software to your computer and let it run in the background (it can be your default screensaver, for example). Then the software aggregates all the data and if one person’s laptop sensor is set off by, for example, a heavy truck going by, nothing happens, but if all the sensors in a 30 mile radius go off, then it’s an earthquake…

Sensors are also behind a new “magic carpet”: “My mother is 90 years old, and my father passed away six years ago. Six months ago, my mother fell, and then she fell another time, and the third time, nobody found her for five hours. We asked her to move in with us, but she didn’t want to. We hired people to live with her in shifts, and she hated it. Now GE and Intel are introducing products aimed at aging at home, and one of the prototypes is a carpet filled with sensors. Over time, it creates a baseline knowledge of ‘normal behavior’ – she walks on the carpet at 9:30 am, and here’s her gait – over time it can predict muscle weakness, and changes to normal patterns and tweet me to “call mom!”

Rick believes one of the biggest opportunities is making better use of previously ignored “dark data”. “For years, meteorologists have had to filter out ‘bioclutter’ from Doppler radar weather systems – the “noise” generated by flocks of birds or bats. But when bird researchers realized they had 15 years of invaluable data on migration patterns they were delighted!”

But Rick also cautioned that there will be new challenges. For example, today, data is typically owned by governments and businesses, not individuals, and there needs to be more thinking about how to make sure that powerful data is not misused.

For more fantastic examples and stories about Big Data is affecting people’s lives, visit http://bigdata.saphana.com/

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As announced last Friday, SAP Visual Intelligence has been renamed to SAP Lumira (you can find the announcement and full FAQ here)

Why Did We Change Another Perfectly Good BI Product Name?

We know that this decision is likely to be met by some eye-rolling from our faithful customers who are still recovering from previous name changes.

The bottom line: we know that there are downsides to such a change, and despite the inevitable disruption it may cause, we feel it’s the right choice. Here are some of the key reasons that tipped the balance:

Family Ties. As we announced earlier this week, the next version of SAP Visual Intelligence (sorry, SAP Lumira) will offer tight integration with SAP’s next-generation cloud BI platform, SAP Lumira Cloud. We feel that it’s more appropriate to use a completely new name for a completely new “network of truth” approach to business intelligence and analytics (oh – and “SAP Visual Intelligence Cloud” is clunky).

Searching and Sharing. SAP Lumira is a more human-friendly yet Google-ready name. As with SAP HANA (which trips off the tongue more easily than “SAP’s new platform for real-time analytics and applications”), a distinctive name makes it easier to find relevant materials (it’s one of the reasons we took the space out of “Business Objects” many years ago). And with community becoming increasingly important, this change should ultimately make it easier to find the information you need to deploy and use the products successfully (but alas, no, this doesn’t mean that Xcelsius is coming back, even if the logic is the same.)

Destined for Greatness. Although BI has been around for a long time, we believe that analytic users are still a minority. SAP Lumira aims to change that by making it easier than ever to get powerful, self-service business intelligence into the hands of everyone. We have big plans for the product that we can’t quite talk about yet, but we believe it is destined for greatness, and it’s less painful to make the switch now than later.

SAPLumira New Features

• Enhanced data manipulation capabilities, with better merge functionality, replay manipulation steps & improved formula editor
• Extended acquisition to more data sources & support different data formats during acquisition
• Empower end users to customize charts , add conditional formatting and create simple user defined views without scripting or coding
• Annotate and share your results at a click of a button on-premise or on the cloud.

Please Give Feedback and Spread the Word

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people that know and use our products, and we’re very grateful. We know that changing names is disruptive, not only for you but for the business people in your organization that use our products to get insight. We’re eager to help you make the change as smooth as possible, so please let us know what we can do to help by taking part in the discussions at the SCN area. And we’d like your help to get the word out about the changes to the rest of the world (#SAPVisi is dead! Long live #SAPLumira!).

Save a Bundle

To celebrate the change, you can take advantage a special SAPPHIRE NOW offer that slashes the regular prices by 90% – SAP Lumira Personal (for spreadsheet data) is only $9 and the full version is only $99. Hurry! The offer is only valid during SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2013, May 13-May 16th, while stocks last!

To take advantage of the offer, go to SAP.com/buylumira and use the promotion code “sapphire”

Data Geek Challenge 2.0

Looking to do something with your new product? At SAPPHIRE NOW, we’re launching the next round of the Data Geek Challenge  at www.sap.com/datageek. To enter, create an interesting view of data using SAP Lumira desktop and your data or data we’ve provided and share with the SAP Data Geek (datageek@sap.com) via SAP Lumira Cloud.

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What’s New in BI 4.1

BI 4.1 is one suite for all insight, one place for all information and on standard for enterprise BI. Here are the highlights of the new release – or you can skip to the end of the post to get a detailed technical presentation of the new features.

The features in this latest release include:

• Unified and highly personalized platform with improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Powerful visualizations that empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Big Data ready with support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive. Improved access to Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. BI 4.1 also includes enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW
• Professional grade BI platform for any size business, any type of deployment and for any role across the organization

BI 4.1 includes features for all five areas of SAP BI innovation

One Suite for All Insight

One Place for All Information

One Standard for Enterprise BI

Three key types of information access: self-service, dashboards and apps, and reporting

New Self-Service Features

New Dashboarding Features

New Reporting Features

New Platform Features

What’s different about this release?

Summary of Key Messages for Business Objects 4.1

One strategy for enterprise BI: one suite for all insight, one place for all information, one standard for enterprise BI.

One Suite For All Insight

Unified and highly personalized

• Improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Deliver engaging information to users when and where they need it
• Create custom experiences with embedded analytic extensions

Powerful visualizations

• Monitor your business with specialized charting and geospatial analytics
• Empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Detect outliers and discover areas to optimize your business

Faster more accurate decisions

• Create and consume BI content from any mobile device
• Empower teams to deliver collaborative decisions
• Simplified deployment to accelerate time to value

One Place For All Information

Big data ready

• Support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive
• Improved access to Oracle Exadata, Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase
• Enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW

Scale and power

• Immediate response time regardless of data volume
• Improved usability to build pervasive BI applications
• Integrate with SAP monitoring, lifecycle management, search, and user management

Speed to deliver

• Enhanced design experience with new creation wizard and integrated data federation
• Improved Web Intelligence report design performance against BW
• Automated universe deployment and lifecycle management

One Standard For Enterprise BI

Professional grade BI platform

• For any size business, small to large
• For any type of deployment, on-premise or on-demand
• For anyone across the organization, individuals, teams, or department

Quality focused

• Increased efficiency to enhance decision making capability and productivity
• Non-disruptive production delivery and information governance across the organization
• Simplified architecture for increased IT responsiveness

Superior breadth of ecosystem

• Open and agnostic suite of products that can leverage existing BI investments
• Supported by global best practices for enhanced adoption
• Enable speedy deployment with shortened time to value

Key Links

• Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects BI Solutions
• BI4 Upgrade Resources
• How to Select the Right BI Tool for Your Environment
• Sizing and Deploying SAP BusinessObjects BI4
• eLearning product tutorials
• Road Maps on SAP Service Marketplace
• SAP’s Release Strategy for Major Releases of SAP BusinessObjects BI

Full, Detailed Technical Feature Documentation/Presentation

Here’s the official feature-level what’s new manual for BusinessObjects 4.1, and a presentation by Ty Miller, delivered at the ASUG2013 / SAPPHIRENOW Conference

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It is possible to build BI ROI cases (typically involving estimates of percentage improvements in part of a business process thanks to better information). But (beyond simple efficiency savings) they will always involve a certain leap of faith – because you don’t know what you don’t yet know.

But choosing not to know what is going on is a leap of faith, too — that can have much greater costs…

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I’ve been passionate about analytics for over twenty years – but my head is still spinning with the amount of change currently going on in the analytics industry. Here’s my quick personal view of the ten top trends in Business Intelligence and Analytics for 2013 — what did I miss?

[Note that a version of this post originally appeared on the SAPPHIRE NOW area of the SAP Community Network]

1. Analytics And Business Intelligence Are Still #1

According to Gartner’s latest CIO survey, the top business priority is back to enterprise growth, and analytics and business intelligence remains the number one technology priority for 2013. And the next three technologies on the priority list (mobile, cloud, and collaboration) are all key areas for analytic innovation.

2. Increasing Analytic Maturity

Thanks to greater industry maturity and new technology opportunities, most organizations are making steps from Descriptive Analytics (“what happened?”) and Diagnostic Analytics (“why did it happen?”) towards Predictive Analytics (“what will happen”) – with Prescriptive Analytics (“how can we make it happen”) as the next frontier.

3. In-Memory is Ripping Up The Old Rules

In-memory computing is providing an opportunity to rethink information systems from scratch. According to Gartner, in-memory: “isn’t only about SAP HANA, isn’t new, isn’t unproven, isn’t only about big companies, and isn’t only about analytics”:

“In-memory computing will have a long-term disruptive impact by radically changing users’ expectations, application design principles, and vendor’s strategy”

4. Breaking Down Old Barriers

In-memory breaks down long-standing analytics barriers. For example, in-memory computing platform SAP HANA supports structured and unstructured data in a single system, and includes a sophisticated, embedded text analysis engine. Predictive or advanced analytics no longer requires a separate system – powerful analytic algorithms are available directly in-memory, without any unnecessary data movement, and thousands of times faster than disk-based predictive system. Since detailed row data is stored without any aggregation, it makes it much easier to let business people upload their own data sets to the corporate hub for analysis.

5. Operations and Analytics Are No Longer Separate

For forty years, operational systems and analytic systems have been separate because of technology limitations. That’s now changing with in-memory platforms. For example, with SAP Business Suite on HANA, transactional data is written directly to memory, where it is instantly available without any of the analytic compromises that have plagued earlier “real-time” analytics.

6. Big Data is a Big Deal

In addition to traditional “transaction data”, it’s now feasible to analyze “interaction data” (events before, after, and around a transaction, such as the products that were considered but then not purchased) and “observation data” (such as data streamed from sensors). Algorithms such as MapReduce and projects such as Hadoop have introduced new opportunities for storing and analyzing data that was previously ignored because of technology limitations. Actuaries are finding new careers and glory as “data scientists”. These new technologies have more than proved their worth in niche or standalone systems, but need to better integrated with existing corporate environments.

7. Analytics Moves To The Core

Analytics is no longer an afterthought to your transaction systems — it’s the heart of your future information infrastructure. The data you are storing now you will still have in 15 or 20 years time, while your applications may be long gone. The next generation of information infrastructures will combine big data, transactional data, analytic data and “content” into a single, coherent set of services that Gartner calls an “information capabilities framework”:

“The information capabilities framework is the people-, process- and technology-agnostic set of capabilities needed to describe, organize, integrate, share and govern an organization’s information assets in an application-independent manner in support of its enterprise information management (EIM) goals.”

SAP is working on this vision with the “real time data platform”, combining SAP HANA with Hadoop, Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, Sybase ESP – and (crucially) end-to-end information governance.

8. Optimizing the User Experience

Today’s information consumers demand the same ease-of-use and immediate access they get in the consumer world. Business people want to be able to grab and mix information on the fly, without having to wait for it to be loaded into a corporate data warehouse. Data discovery tools such as SAP Visual Intelligence cover this essential demand – without sacrificing the corporate needs for enterprise governance (part of a “network of truth“). And of course, people expect a smooth, mobile-ready BI experience with integrated social collaboration, and the option of using a cloud-based infrastructure.

9. Information as an Asset

Along with all the technology changes, there have been big changes to analytics culture. Information is no longer a byproduct of manufacturing processes – it is fast-becoming a key part of the products themselves. Today’s retailers and service providers want to offer “customer experiences” that are tailored to individuals, optimized for the moment, and coherent over time – and that requires powerful new data platforms. As information becomes part of revenue generation, interest in information and control over budgets are swiftly moving to the business units, rather than traditional IT. This is creating new opportunities, but also new IT pressures and organizational issues.

10. The Revenge of Information Governance

As the technology gets more and more powerful, it becomes even more important to fix one of the oldest and least tractable barriers to successful BI: the pain of integrating multiple sets of quality data. Better integration between “big data,” traditional analytic systems, and transaction systems must also involve investments in data governance and solutions such as SAP Information Steward.

What did I miss? Add a comment below…

The Next Round of the Analytics Revolution

If you’d like to find out more about any of these trends, don’t hesitate to contact me, and I’ll help point you to the best experts available. If you’re interested in SAP Analytics technology, should follow the Business Intelligence areas of the SAP Community Network, subscribe to the SAP Analytics Blog, follow @sapanalytics or @timoelliott on Twitter, and join us at the analytics campus of SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2013 in Orlando, May 14-16 to explore industry changes in depth, hear about companies that are implementing analytics in new way, and talk face-to-face with the experts.

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In the first two posts, Donald covered why in-memory is disrupting everything, and why every organization will be running in-memory in 15 to 20 years time, and the business impacts of the new in-memory computing possibilities.

In this post, Donald explains why you should have an in-memory action plan — and how to create one.

These comments are based on my notes taken from the speech, formatted for legibility.

Why you need an in-memory action plan

You need to change the way you look at IT infrastructure, applications, and the infrastructure that’s running those applications. Truly, with some of these new technologies like in-memory technology, there are no barriers, things that you can’t do. Words like “no we can’t do it” start to go away.

I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be cheap, I’m not going to tell you there’s not going to be bumps in the road as you’re doing it, but things that you really thought were not possible are possible now. Period. [examples in previous post]

What do you do in your organization to start to adopt or use some of the in-memory technologies? You are going to spend money on this. Whether the TCO is less or not, you still have to build your skills, you still have to buy applications, you still have to buy the technology and infrastructure and things like that.

Build a business case first. Show the value of what you’re going to do. The return on investment may be long or may be short. We recommend short at first. Small projects with quick return on investment will get you more projects that are bigger and have a greater impact on the company. But you have to prove it first – that’s the key.

Assign a small team of people to look at this. Most companies don’t have a research and development organization in IT (the big ones do). But there’s no reason you can’t have one person looking at the things that are possible with the new technologies, looking at how they can make your current applications more efficient, or start to change how you use them.

So set up a CTO or department of the CTO that has somebody in there who’s just looking at the stuff that’s out five years or ten years from now, so that you will be ready to start to do projects with it when it matures to the level of risk that you’re willing to take.

Always do a POC, proof of concept. Do not just assume that because it looks good on paper it’s going to work for you. You need to test it with your data, with your applications, with your people.

Brainstorming. A lot of people don’t realize that your business unit people are much more IT-aware than they have ever been before. Brainstorm with them on what some of these things can happen, in the business, and how they can make use of it. Who has the budget today? IT? Or the business unit? So if you don’t do this, they’re going to do it anyway, and they’re going to implement the technology without IT. The big disadvantage is that the company doesn’t get the broad skill base that is necessary, and that technology is not shared across the business units. It’s much better to keep it in IT, not because you order it so, but because you are moving along in these new ways, with the business units and what they need.

If you believe what I’m telling you about in-memory technology, as being part of your future, it’s not too early to start to define a strategy for how in-memory is going to enter into your organization and be used.

You may decide that part of the strategy is “we’re going to wait two years to let it mature”. That’s fine, but start looking now at where it can fit and when within the organization, so that you’re prepared and ready to accept it when it comes along. If you’re an early adopter, start tomorrow. If you’re more risk-adverse, next year, the year after.

But at least understand the strategy for how this is going to fit in your organization, because as we believe, it IS coming, whether you want it or not, so you may as well start now to look at a strategy for where it’s going to fit in the future.

Questions and Answers

What would you reply to somebody who said “I’ve already got enough problems in my organization already”?

From a short-term standpoint, I can’t disagree with that.

But some of the new architectures and the in-memory technologies can maybe help you with some of the issues that you have today.

It depends on what the issues are. One of the issues a lot of people have is speed: my applications don’t run fast enough. So maybe there’s in-memory technology that can speed that up. Or maybe moving it to mobile will make it run faster.

Looking at the nexus of forces and looking at technology as a solution to some of your problems may actually help you short-term.

Cloud – maybe cloud can save you some time. I’ll give you a simple example: how are your development costs? Use the public cloud for that. Let your developers develop on an Amazon AWS.

Why is that good? Your people don’t have to set up the development environment. You make a phone call, and you have it. When the project’s done, you make another phone call, and not pay for it any more. You don’t have to go out and buy a server that then you’ve got to figure out what to do with after the development project is done. So there’s a place where cloud immediately can help you.

So some of this new technology is mature enough to solve some of your problems. And then, when you start putting your head together with the business units and start to have an impact on the competitiveness and the bottom line of the organization, that’s where you can really make a difference. Some of this technology may enable you, if you’re a retailer, to turn your inventory one more time a year. Is there any retailer that doesn’t want to do that? And not be out of something when somebody wants it?

If the business unit wants to be an early adopter, but the IT unit is risk-averse and conservative, how does the business user drive this change?

I’ve been around a while in this business. If there’s one thing I’ve heard over and over since I started in the 60s, it’s “IT has to communicate with the business”.  We’ve learned that lesson – that doesn’t work. Going out to dinner with your business liaison once a month and talking with them is nothing.

So one of the concepts that we came up with around twelve years ago, with respect to BI specifically, is the BI Competency Center. The reason that has worked is because it takes business people and IT people and puts them together, working together, not talking. So they make decisions together.

If I’m going to do a new project, all the business units decide what the priority project is. This is a concept that works. Some of your companies can’t afford to have full-time people in it, so you do it virtually: you have a meeting once a week. But they still manage projects, they still make buying decisions on products, they still set strategy for the company. The group should not be run by IT (which is hard to swallow sometimes) – but by the business unit. And most important: the CIO can not be the sponsor. It must be higher in the organization.

So if I’m going to have a “business technology competency center” where people from the business and the industry are going to get together to look at new technologies and where they may work, the sponsor has to be the CFO, the CEO, the Board, somebody like that. Then they will work together to do this.

Risk-adverse IT organizations are normal. You have a job to do to keep the lights on and you’re not going to do it if you take risks. It’s that simple – you’re not going to have a job if you take risks.

So how do you fit that with adopting new technology? Again, just like with the research and development with one person, you can take a couple of people from your organization as part of this “business innovation competency center”, sponsored by the CEO, so you can go hire some new people to do it if you need to, or move people over and backfill them.

They may take on a project with a business unit where you see tremendous value to the business, and you look at something that is, say, in beta. And you look at that technology to enable that business unit to be more competitive, more productive, more profitable, and it doesn’t affect the rest of your organization. You still can deliver the things you’re doing, because it’s “outside”. How do you get to that? You have to get senior management in the organization – not the IT organization – behind you. How do you get that? A small project, to demonstrate to them the value of this kind of thing.

Now one thing that comes to mind immediately: if you look at what’s happened in the past ten years with data warehousing – my area – every time there’s been a recession, database sales and data warehousing sales have dropped off. Except in the 2008/2009 worldwide recession, where every segment of IT was negative growth except DBMS, which was flat. In that environment, flat was positive.

Why? Because when the CIO came in to the CEO and said “I need more money to spend on my data warehouse” and the CEO says “are you nuts, with this economy?!”, you pointed to a flat screen on his wall that had key metrics of the business in “real-time” – for the first time, senior management, the CFO, COO, CEO, could physically see the value that information was bringing to their business.

If you can demonstrate physically to them the advantages of some new technology, then they’re going to buy into it and start to fund it. You can’t say something like “I want a new ERP package” – in an economy like 2009, that will get you fired for asking. But if you have some real strong value that you can demonstrate quickly or instantly to them, they’re going to spend money on it if they think it’s going to save money or help them. So that’s what you have to do. Lots of people say “only large companies can afford that” – but anybody can put it together with at couple of visionary people from the business units and one or two people from IT to put this together, and they can be virtual.

Pfizer is one of our BICC case studies. They have 150 people full time in the BI competency center: 75 employees and 75 consultants. Most people can’t afford to do that, and I’m not suggesting you do. But here are models in-between that make sense, that will fit in everybody’s budget.

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