Great Analytic Dashboards on the BlackBerry PlayBook

Corporate tablet alternatives to the iPad are now on the horizon. At Adobe MAX 2010, Mike Lazaridis demonstrated the features available through Adobe AIR on the BlackBerry PlayBook – including some SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius) using the export-to-AIR functionality developed by the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center. You can already access your SAP data on an iPad with BusinessObjects Explorer for iPhone/iPad, and existing... [Read More...]

Prague SAP World Tour Keynote Presentations

The SAP World Tour visited Prague last week. SAP Czech Republic Managing Director Petr Viktora kicked things off with an audience welcome. Then Manfred Joseph, the Managing Director of SAP CEE, gave an overview of the market trends and SAP’s strategy I followed on with my keynote presentation, “Better Run Business Intelligence”. You can download the presentation in Adobe PDF format or the original PowerPoint slides. The inestimable Norman... [Read More...]

Demo Jam Analytics at SAP TechEd Berlin

The Demo Jam evening at SAP Tech Ed Berlin featured Craig Cmehil as host, a packed audience, and lots of analytics. You can see the full selection of demos on the Virtual TechEd site. Here’s a selection that used analytics as part of their demonstrations. First up were Gregor Wolfe and Phil Loewen, the winning team of the Berlin Innovation Weekend, with a project that was just 30 hours old, to help non-profits improve their marketing and donation... [Read More...]

ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference 2010 Keynotes

It was the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference this week at the Walt Disney Dolphin hotel in Orlando Florida, with around 1600 people and 140+ sessions of BI goodness. The conference included customer presentations from Harley-Davidson, Pepsico, AT&T, Intuit, Allstate, T-Mobile, Disney, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Amtrack, and many others; partner presentations from companies including APOS, Mellmo (RoamBI), Antivia, Centigon Solutions, Infosol,... [Read More...]

ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference 2010 Preview

It’s the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference next week, October 5-7th, at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida. There are over 140 sessions planned covering every aspect of getting the most out of your BI implementation. As usual, there are so many sessions that it’s going to be hard to choose which to attend — here are some that caught my eye. I’ve introduced each session with the reasons you might be interested,... [Read More...]

Sailing Analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship

In business, we often talk about the difference between efficiency (“doing it right”) and effectiveness (“doing the right thing”). And in today’s fast-changing markets, there’s often a tradeoff involved, where if you optimize any particular measure in the short term you may suffer in the longer term (e.g. if you optimize profitability by not investing in new products). In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account,... [Read More...]

An Introduction to the SAP 5O5 World Sailing Championships 2010

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... [Read More...]