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!)

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is the first analysis tool that I’ve seen that I can honestly say is intuitive enough to use without any training (see http://microfinance.sap.com to prove it to yourself).

If you’d like to know more about the product, list of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer” in a previous post.

This post is about the http://explorer.ondemand.com web site that lets you easily upload any Excel spreadsheet and start analyzing, for free, without having to install any software, and the updated version of the Explorer in the Cloud prototype that has just been released by the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

New Features

The new version uses the latest interface of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer XI 3.1 SP1, and adds two key functionalities asked for by early users:

Analysis bookmarking. Once you’ve discovered something in the data, you can now easily send that view of the data to somebody else. You simply click on the “Email” button, you’ll be prompted whether the view should be password-protected, and whether you’d like it to be a permanent bookmark. For example, you may want to make a breakdown of product sales permanently available to the marketing team.

Replace dataset. The new version lets you replace an existing data set with an updated one without disturbing any existing links or bookmarks.

And, of course, you can still easily export the analysis as a data set or image:

“Drinking our Own Champagne”

The solution is not yet available externally on the http://explorer.ondemand.com website, but since we’re big believers in “drinking our own champagne”, it has already been made available internally to all 48,500+ SAP employees as part of the standard internal portal.

Feedback has been extremely positive across all communities and geographies, with hundreds of sessions every day. Here’s one feedback, about a typically pragmatic information need (paraphrased and translated from the original):

“I’m in a technical team. Each region created a spreadsheet containing information about the skills and levels of their local team members. Using the internal Explorer solution, it was easy to consolidate the different spreadsheets, upload them, analyze the data to spot areas we needed to work on, and get the information into PowerPoint so we could share it with others!”

Excel Plug-in and API

An Excel 2007 and 2003 Add-in is available that lets you send information directly from your spreadsheet environment – select the data you want to look at and you can start analyzing just two clicks later.

Finally, an API for Explorer in the Cloud is also available – think about ways you or your organization could ship information directly into the cloud for easy analysis!

If you’d like to know more about Explorer, here’s a new promotion page that gives you links to the latest resources about Explorer.