In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account, and top performance is achieved by attaining the optimal mix. For example, when you’re sailing upwind, there’s a tradeoff between direction and speed. If you sail too close to the wind, you’ll go slowly. If you sail too far off the wind, you’ll go faster, but over a longer distance. The most effective course is between the two, where the combination of boat speed and direction generate the most windward velocity (“velocity made good”).

SAP has a great deal of experience helping with business analytics, and now the SAP BusinessObjects team are using that expertise to create a first set of sailing analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark.

For example, the Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius) visualization below shows the leader board of the fifth race. For each leg, the top ten boats are shown, with the time each arrived at the mark after the leader. The top bar allows you to change the icon size and color based on different criteria. By benchmarking their performance against others, the sailors can get insight into their performance.

For example, in the view above, we can see that crew of Napier and Cram in boat GBR 8701 came in 7th for the fifth leg (tacking upwind to the windward mark). But what’s interesting is that they achieved a higher top speed (6.21 km/h) than the #2, #3, #4 and #5 boats (the color and size of each icon shows the relative top speed compared to the other boats. So, as in the example above, the problem may be that they are sailing just a little too far off the wind compared to the leading boats (although of course sail racing is a lot more complicated than this simple example, and wind shifts, currents, and the tactical maneuvers of the other boats all play a huge part).

Here’s a selection of the analyses available on the analysis page of the official SAP 505 World Championship site:

	The Race Analysis Dashboard provides you with a quick view of the Leader Group and allows for comparison across several key measures at each Mark Rounding point. Using information like Velocity Made Good and Distance Traveled, sailors and spectators alike can put the knowledge behind the data to see which tactics were the leading ones on this day. Is it better to travel further into clean wind to gain speed, or does a tighter course bring the advantage in today’s conditions? Let’s find out together…. Race 2 Race 3 Race 4 Race 5
	The Leader Comparison Report gives the user the ability to compare key metrics across the Top 10 Racers for that Race. Comparing things such as Distance Travelled and Leg Time provides a quick view of how one team compares to the others in this group. Did they sail more distance in order to gain more speed with clean wind? By comparing these key statistics in the Leader Group, we begin to see the results of tactics and strategies and begin to understand the continuous refinement happening on the course. Open Leader Comparison Report
	Race Information Dashboard gives general information about the race, the competitors and the standings to date. See the current positions for the team members representing your home country as you become more hooked on 505 Racing! Open Race Information Dashboard

And here’s a bonus Xcelsius dashboard I put together that lets you find photos of the sailors and boats, by bow number, sail number, helm name, crew name, or country:

As part of the sponsorship of the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark, a crack team of SAP BusinessObjects experts is working hard in the control tower to turn their business expertise into a custom sailing analytics experience.

It turns out that there are a lot of parallels with real-world business BI:

• There’s lots of data available – all of the 5O5 boats are equipped with sophisticated GPS trackers from TracTrac – but the data needs to be transformed before it’s useable for analysis. There’s a lot of heavy lifting required behind the scenes: information has to be combined from multiple sources in different formats and trigonometry is used to calculate the speeds and distances from the raw GPS locations and time stamps. These calculations are then used as the basis for the more sophisticated measures that sailors really care about, such as “velocity made good” (basically, how fast you’re going towards to the next mark).
• Once you have the data, it needs to be presented in a way that makes sense. Like regular business people, most sailors are not deep number-crunchers – they’d like to see useful information displayed in a simple, intuitive way, as graphically as possible. There’s always a choice of different visualizations possible, and technical expertise isn’t enough: the team is working with sailors on exactly what interfaces would be the most effective.
• It’s not really the performance of a particular boat that’s useful: it’s only when you can benchmark your performance against the competition that you can really start increasing your performance. The team are working on ways of presenting the data that can help every competitor see how their actions compared to the best-in-class sailors.

The team are onsite to provide the sailors with information to improve their performance, but also to learn from them: it’s always useful to get a fresh perspective and new set of eyes on familiar problems.

To see the results of their work, check in on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship web site later this weekend.

In the meantime, here’s some photos to give you a taste of the event:

There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet:

For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505 is a great boat and it offers the most competitive racing available. I love the 505,’ said Plattner.

‘Hasso Plattner and Peter Alarie (GER) Race 9, 2007 SAP 5O5 World Championships’ Sail-World.com /AUS ©

If you don’t know anything about 5O5 racing, a video is available that gives a great overview of last year’s 5O5 World sailing championship in San Francisco, including Hasso’s team:

SAP sponsors the event, and provides competitors with access to information that helps them understand their performance, and how it compares to the other teams. Here’s a interview with US 5O5 sailors earlier this year, on the impact of SAP solutions on their racing:

In particular, last year’s competitors had access to SAP BusinessObjects dashboards packed with information about the conditions of each race:

Ryan Goodman explained in a blog post last year  how they were created, using a a combination of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius), and the Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin:

“Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 5O5 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.”

“Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.”

The video below from SAP TV explains the solution in more detail:

Business Intelligence software and sailing – two worlds apart? Not at the SAP 5O5 world championship. For the first time ever, SAP is contributing solutions from the SAP Business Objects portfolio to support sailors. An exciting demonstration of the similarities of business and sailing.

This year’s pre-worlds championships started this week in Aarhus, Denmark. There will be 120 teams from 11 different nations attending and Joe King and his crack team of BusinessObjects technology experts are already on site, working on supporting the sailors’ analytic needs.

The official championship starts on Friday the 30th, and you will be able to follow the action live on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship 2010 web site: http://www.505sapworldchampionship2010.com/, and access the dashboard using the “SAP Analysis” button on the left hand side:

Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

Early press coverage:

• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 8, 2010
• Q&A: Timo Elliott, BI evangelist at SAP, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 9, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, TechCentral (Ireland), July 12, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Leo King (Computerworld UK), Network World, July 9, 2010

In an earlier post, I showed you can use BusinessObjects products like Xcelsius, Explorer on a mobile phone, and drill through to Web Intelligence running on the bi.ondemand.com BI-in-the-cloud platform.

This post takes things one step further, with the help of SAP BusinessObjects partner Antivia. They have a great add-on solution called XWIS that makes it easier to access real-time Web Intelligence (soon to be called “Interactive Analysis”) directly from an Xcelsius dashboard.

The XWIS solution makes it easier to create dashboards containing live Web Intelligence data, complete with the ability to create new Web Intelligence queries without leaving the dashboard interface.

You can see various demonstrations of their product on their web site:

Mark Hudson, the founder of Antivia, provided me with a sample file formatted for a mobile device, and I can confirm that it’s a also great solution for mobile dashboards. Here’s a short video demonstration of the XWIS interface in action, on a Google Nexus One mobile phone running the latest version of Android, which supports Adobe Flash technology.

Here’s a more in-depth demonstration, showing off some of the key Antivia features (which also work, of course, on any regular PC that runs Adobe Flash). On the home page, I set up a browser bookmark (NOT an application) that calls a standard web page containing  the Antivia Xcelsius dashboard:

The dashboard is an Adobe Flash file, so I hold my finger on the screen for a few seconds to get the option to open it in full screen mode. The result: an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, with live data from a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence server:

Antivia makes it easy to set up interactions such as drill down to the next level:

Here’s what you get if you click on the “product analysis” button – you can of course use all the different Xcelsius graphical representations: pie charts, sparklines, etc. etc.

Clicking on a slice of the pie chart to get more details works perfectly on the mobile device:

In this section, I can drill down two levels and the rest of the model automatically updates:

The really powerful part is the ability to create complete new queries on the fly. I simply click on the “My Analysis” button, and create a new view:

The Antivia Xcelsius plugin makes it easy to provide a fully-fledged Web Intelligence query panel, directly within my Xcelsius Dashboard:

I can create any new question I want against the data warehouse, dragging and dropping my business terms that I want to see:

I can highlight objects and change their properties (aggregate as sum, average, etc.)

I can add new conditions and filters:

And I can add sorts:

To get the results, I simply click on the “view” button in the top right, to send it to the server, where it is converted to the SQL required to query the database, using the BusinessObjects semantic layer technology. The results are then brought back and displayed within the dashboard:

At any time, I can go back to the query definition — for example, in order to make it a crosstab (there’s also a “tree” option available, but this was the only Antivia feature I could find that didn’t seem to work correctly with the (beta) mobile version of Flash)

And here are the results in cross-tab format:

So, there you have it: a great solution that leverages any investment you’ve already made in Web Intelligence, and already works extremely well in mobile environments. Please contact Antivia if you’d like more information.

I gave a presentation in Finland earlier this year as part of the Nordic “Butterfly” tour, talking about the future of Business Intelligence:

Ever since the first abacus, information technology has been an essential part of delivering timely information, staying accountable to stakeholders, reducing inefficiencies, and flexibility when faced with fast-changing environments. But for the first time in history, consumer technology interfaces have been outpacing what’s available to the average corporate knowledge worker.

How can we combine the best of enterprise technology and Web 2.0 to build greater visibility, transparency, and accountability into the way organizations work? Business intelligence technology needs to meet the demands of tomorrow’s “digital natives”; integrate seamlessly with cloud data and platforms; align people, conversations, and data with business strategy; and make the most of the infrastructures we have today:

• Simple: the right interfaces for the right people at the right time
• Seamless: tightly integrated with data sources, applications, and business processes
• Social: allow people to collaborate around analyzing information and making decisions
• Strategic: closing the loop between strategy to execution

The feedback from the audience was very positive, and so we’ve taken the 45-minute presentation and posted it to YouTube as a series of short, single-topic sections (see below). The presentation is available for download as an Adobe PDF document, and as the original PowerPoint presentation file.

The conference also included a more detailed BI presentation (not recorded) that focused on more leading-edge future BI topics such as social network analysis and augmented corporate reality. It is also available for download as an Adobe pdf file, and as a PowerPoint presentation file

Take a look, and if you find it interesting, please share with others in your organization! (and if you are interested in a tailored BI vision presentation for your company or conference, please contact me at telliott@timoelliott.com)

[Update: There’s now a nice convenient viewer for the various videos available:]

Part 1 Introduction (3:12 min)

Summary:

• High-level BI trends
• Brief summary of BusinessObjects porfolio

Part 2  Simple (9:05 min)

Summary:

• Taking BI to the next level: Simple
• Roadblocks to success
• Taking cues from the consumer world
• BI interfaces that you don’t need training to use
• Japanese picnics

Part 3 Simple Continued (4:23 min)

Summary:

• Adapting interfaces to end users
• Other interfaces, including mobile devices
• Going faster

Part 4 Seamless (9:33 min)

Summary:

• Taking BI to the next level: Seamless
• The importance of data
• Bridging the gap between central and personal data
• Text analytics
• BI OnDemand
• Embedded BI
• “Automagical” Text to Query

Part 5: Social (5:07 mins)

Summary:

• Taking BI to the next level: Social
• Collaboration is important
• Spitfire Marine example
• StreamWork demonstration

Part 6: Strategic (9:26 min)

Summary:

• Taking BI to the next level: Strategic
• Budgeting and finance
• Financial vs. other Risk
• Sustainability performance management
• Business applications of the future
• Conclusion

The latest release of Android, v2.2 (“Froyo”) supports the Adobe flash technology used by Xcelsius (now called Dashboard Design) and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. So now you can access your dashboards, reports, and exploration spaces directly from your mobile device without requiring a separate application (e.g. as you do for the iPhone and iPad).

It also means you can reuse all the effort you’ve put into developing Xcelsius dashboards and make them into slick, use-them-on-the-fly interfaces for your road warriors. Here’s a quick video demonstration of my Google Nexus One phone running Xcelsius, WebIntelligence, and Explorer, based on a Formula One data set (SAP is a sponsor of the Vodaphone McLaren Mercedes racing team, and the McLaren team use SAP’s PLM software).

Here’s a step-by-step picture view of the same demo:

1: open the xcelsius dashboard, using a bookmark link, or typing the dashboard link directly: http://timoelliott.com/blog/docs/formula1_android_open.swf

(Note: the Xcelsius icon below is NOT an application that you have to install, just a shortcut to the URL, which opens in a browser)

The flash file will open up in the browser:

To make it full screen, press and hold your finger on the flash file until the bar below appears

Then click on the left-hand icon to make the flash file full screen:

From here, you can explore the dashboard, for example, press the “Driver” button:

Or the “Engine” button:

You can also “drill through” to information using the other SAP BusinessObjects products. For example, touching the “Report” button can take you directly to a Web Intelligence report (this won’t work with the link above, because it’s a report only available to my account – the link takes you to the generic bi.ondemand.com page, and if you’re previously logged on – you can sign up for a free account – it will take you directly to your data sets, reports, etc.)

This report is rendered in HTML, and full interactable – all drill-downs, etc. will work, and you can use the standard “pinch” gestures to zoom into part of the report, scroll around, etc.:

Click on the “back” arrow on the phone (left-most icon on the bottom row of buttons on the phone) to get back to the previous dashboard (note, I occasionally came across a flash bug here, where the top bar would still appear, throwing off the tracking location of your finger. If this happens, hold your finger until the full screen icon appears, then click below it to get back to full screen)

Next, click on the “Explore button” to open a new pop-up window (you need to have enabled pop-ups in your browser options, or nothing will happen), and it will load an Explorer session with Formula One data (why do this via a pop-up? to make sure that the screen proportions are correct for the next step):

(Note: this data is stored on a corporate SAP server, but you can do the same thing using data you’ve uploaded to your free bi.ondemand.com account)

As before, hold down your finger and make the flash full screen:

This interface requires precision to use, but with a bit of practice, it’s feasible. Here, for example, I click on the pie chart icon to change the chart type:

Next, I click on the “Advanced” section under “Nationality” to get this window, and I chose “British”:

And by clicking on the little arrows to the left of the “Items to Select” section, you can expand it:

Or you can click on the little arrow to the left of “Visualize the data” to expand that part:

Here’s a copy of the Xcelsius dashboard I used (you can also download the flash and Xcelsius file) – the report button links to bi.ondemand.com, rather than the exact report, because I haven’t yet found a way to share it with everybody:

A few best-practice tips if you’re interested in recreating a demo like this:

• The screen size for the Google Nexus One is 480×800. When I designed the dashboard, I found I had to make the buttons and fonts extra-big in order to make them useable on the phone.
• To get a flash file to show full screen on your Android phone, simply press and hold. A bar will appear with a button to make the flash file full screen.
• Explorer automatically resizes to the available browser size available. Unfortunately, this means that even when you make it full screen, it doesn’t have the right proportions to fill the screen. I got around this by using a popup window set to 480×800, and enabling pop ups in the phone’s browser.
• Obviously, all this will be a lot easier as a new range of Android devices with larger screen sizes become more widely available, such as the French Archos 7 tablet

So. There you have it: Xcelsius, Web Intelligence and Explorer all running smoothly on your mobile device, no apps required!

Please share your best BusinessObjects-for-Android dashboards, reports and hints and tips, and I’ll put them in a follow-up post!

Here’s a short overview of the what, why, and how of SAP BusinessObjects, whiteboard-style…

The SAP World Tour touched down at the ICC in Birmingham in the UK on July 8th, part of a program covering 80+ cities across the globe. Business intelligence was featured heavily throughout the day: during the keynotes, on the show floor, in several innovation sessions, and a dedicated afternoon BI track. This post gives an overview of the day, discusses the content of sessions in the BI track, and includes links to all the presentation materials used.

Tim Noble, the UK Managing Director, kicked the day off with a review of the current trends affecting technology and the economy as a whole, and reiterating SAP’s high-level strategic themes of On-Premise, On-Demand, On-Device, and Orchestration. If you’re interested in hearing more about this, check out the keynote videos from the SAPPHIRE NOW web site.

Sanjay Poonen, SAP’s head of business user and line of business solutions, came up to present on the theme of customer-centric innovation, illustrated with customers who had used information to change the way they did business.

The Guest Speaker for the event was Jonathan Neale, the Managing Director of the McLaren racing team (sponsored by SAP, among others), who gave a wonderful presentation explaining how his organization worked to increase their performance. He drew many parallels between the challenges of Formula 1 racing and the rest of the business world.

For example, the team relies heavily on analytics to increase the driver performance, including real-time telemetry and benchmarking of the two drivers on the team, to ensure the best possible numbers at each point of the course:

Video and GPS is used to work out the best line to take through each bend:

And, just like in the business world, experience and intuition is important, and must be added into the analysis – in this case, the drivers’ hand-written notes about how they felt about the car’s handling at different points around the course:

After lunch, the afternoon breakout sessions started, including a dedicated BI track, devoted to the BusinessObjects BI and EIM set of products.

I kicked off the afternoon with a “mini-keynote” presentation on the Business Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic (very similar to previous presentations of the same title, if you’re already downloaded them). The slides are available for download in PowerPoint format or as an Adobe PDF document.

Next up was a well-received end-to-end data-to-dashboard “demo fest” by Ian Henry and Barry Dodds (which I unfortunately missed because of journalist meetings – I hope to be able to follow up with their content at a later date).

Then Richard Neale talked about The Powers of Pervasion: the benefits of pervasive BI, and how to achieve it.

Interesting statistics included: the benefits of widespread BI adoption, including improving the time required to gather information and to make decisions:

Organisations with pervasive BI saw an average 24% increase in operating profit:

The importance of self-service delivery of information as part of pervasive BI deployments:

The best ways to improve and encourage BI usage:

Recommended resources included several analyst white papers and the books “Competing on Analytics” and “Analytics at Work” by Thomas Davenport et al.

Richard also outlined SAP’s four-step process for developing a solid BI strategy, with a series of interactive “playbooks” that help you guide through the process:

Next came Dean Farrow, talking about the BI innovations in the XI 3.1 service packs 1 and 2, which contain more new features than you may have realized.

Highlights in SP2 include:

Highlights in SP3 include:

Carl Streatfield followed up with an in-depth explanation of the BusinessObjects onDemand offerings

Carl explained the many benefits of BI OnDemand:

• No messy software install
• No more service packs or bug fixes
• No training staff on how to administer it
• No need to buy, maintain a server and deal with IT
• Always 24×7 availability
• Multi-tenanted
• OpEx rather than CapEx

And he outlined a list of questions that helps determine whether a BI OnDemand offer is the right fit for your project:

• Are you on a tight time line?
• Do you use Salesforce.com or any other SAAS offering?
• Do you have tight IT resources (personal and hardware wise)?
• Are you having challenges getting access to CAPEX?
• Do you want share data with customers/partners?
• Are you allowed to put data outside of your firewall?
• Are there any legislative reasons why you can’t?
• Do you absolutely need to connect to On-Premise data? (ie: BW)
• Do you worry about peak usage on your BI system?

To round out the day, Andy Hirst covered the range of BusinessObjects Industry Business Analytics applications.

Andy covered the range of analytic applications currently available:

As well as their technical architecture, and details about each solution.

Overall, it was a great day, and we look forward to doing the same next year!

And here’s a full set of pictures from the event:

There are only three matches left in this year’s World Cup, and the competition is wide open after a series of upsets have knocked out some of the big international players, including the winners of the last three world cup tournaments: Italy, France, and Brazil.

To enhance your enjoyment of the game – or simply to see a real-life example of what you can do with business intelligence technology, check out the suite of tools offered as part of the SAP BusinessObjects 2010 Football Experience:

The site lets you:

• Easily review historical data from matches going back nearly 50 years to gain perspective on the game.
• Check out details on the teams and players as they compete for the title.
• Analyze match information, such as shot location, to search for patterns of play and success.
• Gain insight, spot trends, and use the information you uncover to make better decisions.
• Receive live commentary during the matches so you can stay informed.

In order to get answers to questions such as:

• What positions typically score the most points?
• What is a likely final score?
• Does being the host country influence success?
• Which teams consistently make it to the final rounds?
• Which players have previous tournament experience?
• Is there a particular area of the goal that a goalkeeper is less successful in defending?
• Is one player or team receiving more yellow cards than the others?

Trivia contest

Once you have the hang of the different tools below, why not take part in the Trivia Contest? Each week day a game is on, there will be a question tweeted about from the @businessobjects Twitter account, and the first correct response is the winner!.

The first thing to do is register with the site (you can still access some of the functionality without doing this, but you won’t get the full flavor).

You can then go to the main screen and choose which of the seven main areas you’d like to explore:

• Go Explore! World cup statistics with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
• Predictor: Predictions using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius
• Goal History: Reporting using SAP Crystal Reports
• Social Network Analyzer: The relationship between teams, matches, players…
• Team Information: An Xcelsius dashboard of team information
• Goal History by team: Reporting using SAP Crystal Reports
• Jive community space: Join in the conversation!

Go Explore!

Click the Explorer button to open up a choice of information spaces: either the full statistics, or a view of other people’s predictions (see next section) (note, if you only see one choice, check again that you’re registered / cookies are enabled)

Click on the first one and start investigating – e.g. one of the semi-finals is Germany vs. Spain – here’s the result of the previous time the two teams met:

There’s also a set of shortcuts that you can use to get an idea of what kinds of questions are possible:

• What unlucky player has hit the goal post on 4 separate occasions in a single World Cup tournament? ANSWER
• Jürgen Klinsmann is an former player who is now working as an ESPN commentator. When did he play, and how many goals did he score? ANSWER
• What Italian goal keeper has had a remarkable 69 saves in World Cup play? ANSWER
• I heard that Real Madrid is a good club. How are the players from that team in this year’s World Cup?
  Has anyone scored? ANSWER

Predictor

Using Xcelsius, you can predict the scores of the different matches, and then see how good your prediction record is over time:

And then you can access a leaderboard report that gives you the top predictors, overall, or by round, as a pdf document:

(and remember, you can do exploration of the same data by opening the other information space in the explorer section above).

Goal History

The goal history section opens up a Crystal Report with detailed data about exactly where and how goals were scored during matches:

And you can drill down on information by different teams – here’s Germany’s scoring pattern in the last world cup, for example – something that Spain might like to look into before their next match…

World Cup Social Network Analyzer

The SAP Social Network Analyzer aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It automatically generates useful social networks that can be used:

• to find and connect people,
• to take actions based on individual/organization/company information,
• to send an email, meeting request or call a person,
• to build the right team,
• to better manage and control processes,
• to understand the relationships between suppliers and buyers,
• to analyze people’s information and organization using BI tools,
• to integrate social network information inside any application…

All the data from the world cup has been fed into the online prototype, to give you an idea of how the players and their teams relate. For example, here’s the network of matches played by the USA over the years:

Here are some same views:

• Player with current national team, coach, number of goals in world cup, size, height, position or jersey number
• Teams with their respective players and coaches
• Players who scored during a world cup still in 2010.
• Who scored the most
• Previous world cup matches between two teams

Team Information

This section gives you access to an interactive Xcelsius dashboard that shows information about the different teams, e.g. by location:

And by previous team experiences in the world cup:

And the players involved:

Goals per Team

Another example of a Crystal Report, this time using the Crystal Reports Viewer plugin.

Jive Community Space

Join in the discussion! Will the Dutch be able to set the pace in the next match?

Other Dashboards

Other folks have also taken the plunge and used the SAP BusinessObjects tools to create useful dashboards… here’s a nice one from the MyXcelsius.com web site, using the great Google Maps 2.0 plugin for Xcelsius:

SAP Football Ad:

If you’re into football, you’ll enjoy this SAP Ad from 2008, courtesy of www.danielfreestyle.com (filmed entirely around San Francisco, which does a pretty good job of looking like a trip around the globe!)