SAP Social Intelligence, born as the social network analytics prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center (now SAP Research Prototypes), is now fully launched and available as an integral part of the SAP StreamWork collaborative decision solution.

With so much going on with various launches including BusinessObjects version 4.0 and HANA, you may have missed the launch of the Enterprise Edition of StreamWork, but it was a key step for integration with the rest of enterprise information infrastructure, and SAP has announced that StreamWork is a central part of the ongoing collaboration strategy — not just of business analytics, but also SAP’s core applications like CRM and PLM.

The project manager, Sharon Haver, has just posted a brand-new video that explains social intelligence using funky blue people (including the key employees that work on the StreamWork product) tied together with rope – it looks like they had a lot of fun making it…

Enjoy.

Ajay Ohri of DecisionStats.com has posted my email interview on Business Intelligence trends – you can read a copy below.

What do you think I missed?

Top five events in 2010:

(1) Back to strong market growth. IT spending plummeted last year (business intelligence continued to grow, but more slowly than previous years). This year, organizations reopened their wallets and funded new analytics initiatives — all the signs indicate that BI market growth will be double that of 2009.

(2) The launch of the iPad. Mobile BI has been around for years, but the iPad opened the floodgates of organizations taking a serious look at mobile analytics — and the easy-to-use, executive-friendly iPad dashboards have considerably raised the profile of analytics projects inside organizations.

(3) Data warehousing got exciting again. Decades of incremental improvements (column databases, massively parallel processing, appliances, in-memory processing…) all came together with robust commercial offers that challenged existing data storage and calculation methods. And new “NoSQL” approaches, designed for the new problems of massive amounts of less-structured web data, started moving into the mainstream.

(4) The end of Google Wave, the start of social BI. Google Wave was launched as a rethink of how we could bring together email, instant messaging, and social networks. While Google decided to close down the technology this year, it has left its mark, notably by influencing the future of “social BI”, with several major vendors bringing out commercial products this year.

(5) The start of the big BI merge. While several small independent BI vendors reported strong growth, the major trend of the year was consolidation and integration: the BI megavendors (SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) increased their market share (sometimes by acquiring smaller vendors, e.g. IBM/SPSS and SAP/Sybase) and integrated analytics with their existing products, blurring the line between BI and other technology areas.

Top three trends next year:

(1) Analytics, reinvented. New DW techniques make it possible to do sub-second, interactive analytics directly against row-level operational data. Now BI processes and interfaces need to be rethought and redesigned to make best use of this — notably by blurring the distinctions between the “design” and “consumption” phases of BI.

(2) Corporate and personal BI come together. The ability to mix corporate and personal data for quick, pragmatic analysis is a common business need. The typical solution to the problem — extracting and combining the data into a local data store (either Excel or a departmental data mart) — pleases users, but introduces duplication and extra costs and makes a mockery of information governance. 2011 will see the rise of systems that let individuals and departments load their data into personal spaces in the corporate environment, allowing pragmatic analytic flexibility without compromising security and governance.

(3) The next generation of business applications. Where are the business applications designed to support what people really do all day, such as implementing this year’s strategy, launching new products, or acquiring another company? 2011 will see the first prototypes of people-focused, flexible, information-centric, and collaborative applications, bringing together the best of business intelligence, “enterprise 2.0”, and existing operational applications.

And one that should happen, but probably won’t:

(4) Intelligence = Information + PEOPLE. Successful analytics isn’t about technology — it’s about people, process, and culture. The biggest trend in 2011 should be organizations spending the majority of their efforts on user adoption rather than technical implementation.

More content from Decisionstats.com:

• See the views of James Kobelius
• See the views of Jill Dyche

I’m doing a webcast today (Tuesday November 16th) on “The Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic” – here’s the abstract:

Ever since the first abacus, information technology has been an essential part of delivering timely information, staying accountable to stakeholders, reducing inefficiencies, and maintaining 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.

Attend this Webcast to understand how we can 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 must 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 and execution

You can sign up here, and here’s a copy of the presentation:

• zip file containing the PowerPoint slides and associated Xcelsius dashboards: The Intelligence Future
• or as a pdf file: The Intelligence Future

Here’s the link to the simple, seamless, social, strategic presentation recording (registration required).

I attended the IDC BI Roadshow today in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Tom Vavra, the IDC research director for the CEMA region, started off the day with a presentation entitled “The Next Wave of Business Intelligence”. He was under unusual pressure, because (1) his family was in the room, and it was the first time they’d seen him speak, and (2) part of the room fell on another IDC employee in the middle of his speech (he literally “brought the house down”).

The presentation was full of interesting BI data nuggets, including:

• CEE IT spending dropped 13% in 2009, but returned to a predicted 10.9% growth in 2010 (Czech spending didn’t fall as fast, and won’t jump back as quickly – expected 6.4% growth this year).
• Business analytics was one of the only areas that still experienced WW growth (of 2.5%) last year.
• Interestingly, “new and exciting” advanced analytics only grew +0.6% last year, compared to “boring old” query and reporting’s +2.9% and data warehousing’s +2.5%
• BI is the #4 in European IT spending priorities after improving service quality, IT security, and IT cost reductions.
• In CEMA survey last year, 62.9% said number of users set to expand over the coming year. 34.6% said no change, only 2.5% saw a decrease.
• In terms of types of BI that companies are deploying, #1 was dashboards, followed by multidimensional analysis, collaboration, mobile devices, reporting, statistical analysis, search, and text analytics.

Tom showed how far we still have to go in using BI to actually support decision-making. When asked, business people cited the following, in order of importance:

• Attachments in email
• Phone conversations
• In-person meetings
• Emailing links to content
• Team workspaces
• Shared applications

The top two pain points of making decisions will be familiar to anybody who has used or implemented BI systems:

• Having to launch multiple disconnected applications
• Ability to find relevant information

But further down the list are some indications of areas where BI has to mature to become true DSS or decision-support systems (as the industry was known when I first joined it twenty years ago).

• Storing my thoughts with the information for future reference
• Knowing how a decision actually affected a project
• Ability to find colleagues with relevant knowledge / skills

Technology used for decisions – email attachments, phone conversations, in-person meetings, emailing links to content centrally, team workspaces, shared applications

Tom went on to cover changes to the BI landscape. The first is BI consolidation, with the WW BI tools revenue share of the top 10 vendors rising inexorably every year from 2003 (~58%) to 2009 (~74%). The second is the rise of on-demand or software-as-a-service BI, predicted to rise at 22.4% CAGR 2008-2013, compared to the general business analytics software market of “only” 7.2%

Next up was Dai Clegg, the EMEA Marketing Director for Netezza, who presented the benefits of their data warehouse appliance product:

“We do one thing, and hopefully we do it very well… we invented it, we deliver it, and we mean it: i’t’s a piece of equipment that you can just plug in, and it does the job” (Netezza’s 400 employees and $200M-growing-at-45% revenues are in the process of being acquired by IBM)

Dai did a good job of vaunting the benefits of the solution (but once you’ve said “it uses hardware/parallel processing/memory technology to go faster” there’s not necessarily that much to say of interest to a general BI audience).

Thirty minutes into the 25-minute slot, Kamil Matuska, the DW manager of T-Mobile in the Czech Republic was invited up to explain how his team had used the product. He uses a relational data warehouse with SAP BusinessObjects, and the Netezza appliance is currently operated in parallel, and has resulted in dramatic performance increases (operational reporting from several hours down to seconds). He hopes to be able to operate the data warehouse directly on the Netezza appliance within the coming year.

I liked this, from the Netezza brochure: “procedure for deploying a Netezza” (there’s not enough humor in enterprise applications!)

After the break, I gave my vendor-neutral Clear Intelligence future presentation (a 25 minute version), which can be downloaded as a PowerPoint file or a PDF document.

After my presentation, Evgeny Velesevich, an ex-Cognos employee, now in charge of sales in the CEE for IBM, talked about the IBM sales analytics package.

The presentation was a little heavy on sales information, but he did make the point that most organizations believe that they have to “build their own”, that they are uniquely qualified to put a BI solution together – which is a bit like building your own car: it might have been necessary a hundred years ago, but now most of us prefer to buy our cars as a complete package, because other people can do it much better than we could ever hope to be.

Finally, some HDR photos I took in Prague…

The next IDC CEMA BI Roadshow session I’ll be presenting at is in Moscow, on November 18th and then Athens, on November 19th (I think).

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 gathering – assisted by last year’s winner Alexis Naibo from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

The team used SAP StreamWork to colloborate on the project.

They uploaded data into BI OnDemand and made it available for analysis

Provided a full range of analytics to help improve donation gathering:

And then used the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer application to access the data from mobile devices, using the new Augmented Explorer functionality on the iPad to see the information overlaid on maps:

Or overlaid on the real world with an iPhone:

As they turn the phone, the points appear over the real world.

Next up was Stephen Dawson and Noreen O’Connor showing the new SAP Event Insight:

Noreen explained that she was in charge of a data processing facility, and Event Insight had been set up to provide alerting and monitoring of the system

With a real-time dashboard, using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius (now “Dashboards”)

Noreen slowly pulled out the cables one by one to see what would happen:

The dashboard immediately reflected the new status:

And the system alerted the sale manager using a mobile API

Noreen replugs in the server – problem solved.

Next up was Alexander Dreiling and Marek Kowalkiewicz with an alternate type of augmented reality, using the new-fangled QR codes:

When you view the bar codes through a mobile device, other information can be overlaid based on the detected pattern.

Alexander and Marek made it to the final three, but the winner of the Demo Jam was a Florian Shultz and Tobias Queck with a demo using with pen, paper, a livescribe, and beer.

The SAP BusinessObjects Augmented Explorer prototype mentioned in previous posts, created by the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center now available, as a standard part of the BusinessObjects Explorer for iPhone / iPad download from the Apple App Store. You’ll find some pictures below taken from official blog post and you can download the official documentation and samples here.

Here’s a video demo I did of a slightly-older version of the prototype, showing you how it works (the icons aren’t as jumpy now!):

Here’s a diagram showing how it works:

This diagram and some other mockups of how the tool might be used are available as a PowerPoint presentation – and you can create your own mockups by ungrouping the elements, replacing the pictures, moving the points, etc.

Some screen shots of the final version:

I also put together another sample data set, that includes some links to extra graphics, and generates a random set of numbers and locations around a point that you choose: download the Excel spreadsheet (after you’ve uploaded it to BI OnDemand, don’t forget to set the first column to “MIN” in the Explorer view!)

Finally, here are some graphics that may be useful for the Points of Interest, showing both a trend (the arrow), and whether it’s on target or now (the background color. It’s available in two ways, to make it easier to use in Excel calculations, etc: first as a straight 1-9:

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Then as two numbers – the first indicates the type of arrow, the second indicates the background color (see the spreadsheet above for an example of how to use this)

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Then some miscellaneous icons

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And finally, here’s a Photoshop file containing all the layers used in the icons above, that you can use to develop your own (you’ll need a public server to put them on)

Please provide the SAP Innovation Center feedback to make sure we know how you’re using this and things you would like to see it do in the future. Please remember, this is a prototype only and NOT for use in production environments.

Also stay connected with SAP BusinessObjects innovation center RSS feed or Twitter feed.

Earlier this week, SAP Partner IT Logix held its annual BusinessObjects working group day at the idyllic Uto Kulm hotel, on top of a mountain near Zurich (the only way to get there is to hike from the train station – travel light!)

The sold-out sessions included an excellent BusinessObjects BI 4 update, a hands-on laboratory for the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer products, and (something that’s important, and often overlooked) long periods for networking. Naturally enough given the country, everything ran like clockwork…

I gave the morning keynote, available for download below (very similar to other recent BI keynote presentations)

It was the Skyrr Fall Conference in Reykjavik a couple of weeks ago, and among the long list of sessions, I covered three topics:

• An evening executive session on “Why BI Projects Fail and What To Do About It”
• A vendor-neutral BI Trends keynote “Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic”
• An SAP BusinessObjects breakout session “Information to Insight”

Here’s the video of the keynote:

All the presentations are available for download (in PowerPoint format) below — please don’t hesitate to reuse the slides (if you do, please recommend this blog to your audience).

If you do ever visit Reykjavik, you MUST visit the blue lagoon. It’s possible to take a taxi from town to the pool, store your luggage, do a proper visit and swim, and take a taxi to the airport in just under two hours. It’s as amazing as it looks (although the pictures don’t convey the occasional whiff of sulphur/rotten eggs)

Finally, just to show that data quality problems are ubiquitous – in real life, data gets manually copied all the time, with the inevitable errors… Remember (for the sake of the children!) to include data quality in your BI project

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

Whether or not you can physically come to one of our SAPPHIRE NOW events in Orlando or Frankfurt, you can give us feedback about our latest products and prototypes: business intelligence, in-memory, mobile BI, sustainability products, and much more. There are links to online resources below – in the meantime, here’s what’s available in the Frankfurt show:

To find the test drive area in Frankfurt, turn left as you arrive through the entrance of the top floor show area (assuming you turned right as you came through the ground floor entrance and took the escalators to the top floor)

Online Resources:

Here’s a selection of links where you can go and watch videos of some of the products in action, or try them out yourself:

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad & iPhone

Get insight into your business in a few flicks away. Through simple and fast search, intuitive data exploration and visualization, and high performance and scalability, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer allows you to answer business questions “on-the-fly” and regardless of where you are.

Try it Out! Watch the video

Carbon Exploration

Carbon Exploration is an interactive and visually engaging application that helps employees capture and explore their personal and work related CO2 emissions.

Try it Out! Watch the video

Exploration dashboards

Exploration Dashboards is a prototype that leverages in-memory technology to enable any business user to create your own dashboard. It delivers a simplified experience for creating dynamic dashboards without the need for training, complex workflows or technical knowledge.

Try it out! Watch the video

Social Network Analyzer

The Social Network Analyzer prototype aggregates enterprise data using business intelligence techniques to help you find people, groups and other entities.  Understand their relationships, Connect with them.

Try it out! Watch the video

For more great prototypes, take a look at the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center site.