Here’s a video from this years SAPPHIRE NOW in Madrid, featuring Mimi Speir, Steve Lucas, and Andrew Murray giving an overview of SAP BusinessObjects mobile directions:

Highlights include:

• New SAP BusinessObjects experience mobile application, based on the Exploration Views functionality from the BusinessObjects innovation center, with demo data from Experience.SAP.com
• Easily take a mobile analysis and create a StreamWork activity for collaborative decision-making
• Easily “mobilizing” your existing BusinessObjects reports
• Support for each level of the “mobile needs hierarchy”, including fully customized mobile applications

• Demonstration of integration with RightHemisphere, a recent SAP acquisition that allows companies to synchronize visual and business data, combining a camera and schematic view:

Overlaying colors by temperature from data in the ERP system:

Finding a required part replacement using geolocation data:

I’m in Melbourne for the Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Annual User Conference. There’s a great agenda including talks from Dave Rathbun of PepsiCo, Ingo Hilgefort of SAP BusinessObjects (the man who literally wrote the book on Web Intelligence — and Explorer, and BusinessObjects with BW), Tom Nather of Cleveland Clinic, Mark Rousel of Sydney Water, Rajeev Kapur of Newell Rubbermaid, and many, many others.

The hashtage for the conference is #mbo10 if you’d like to follow along…

I’m presenting the keynote this morning on “The Clear Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic” (a slightly updated version from last month’s Nordic BI Tour), and here are the slides in ppt and pdf format.

RoamBI for iPhone, which I reviewed last year, has long been the best-looking mobile BI application available in the market. Now the folks at RoamBI have been one of the very first vendors worldwide to come out with an updated application for the iPad, and they provided me with one in order to test their brand-new version.

First Impressions

It’s as beautiful as its predecessor, and the new document formats available use the new expanded workspace to pack in a lot more analytic ability. This video from Information Week shows Quinton Aslbury of RoamBI demonstrating what you can do, including additional data not included in the original documents, such as overlaid trending algorithms.

There is a series of videos available on the RoamBI web site that illustrate the different document types available.

View SAP Carbon Disclosure Data

SAP and RoamBI have partnered to provide easy access to information from SAP and the Carbon Disclosure Project. When you install the free application, it comes with a series of sample documents, including one that shows SAP’s carbon footprint data, showing progress towards SAP’s announced goal of reducing the company’s carbon footprint back down to 2000 levels by 2010.

It shows SAP’s carbon footprint for various categories (corporate cars, electricity for facilities, business flights, etc.), broken down by region (EMEA has to do the most work!)

To use your own data with the application, you register for an account on to the RoamBI Publisher web site and choose one of the available analytics. The free version lets you upload your local Excel spreadsheets, the Pro version expands access to online sources such as Google Spreadsheets, and the Enterprise Server lets you access your corporate BI documents.

Working with SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports documents

The RoamBI ES3 Enterprise Server option lets you use Web Intelligence documents and Crystal Reports from BusinessObjects Infoview as data sources for the analytics:

You simple log on to the Roam BI publisher web site, log onto your enterprise BI portal, and import the documents you’d like to see on the iPad:

Pricing

The basic version is free, the Pro app is $99 per user, and ES3 is $795 per user for a perpetual license with a minimum of 50 users.

Conclusion

First, if you’re the leader of a business intelligence project, this application is an essential part of marketing the value of your systems. I’ve had the pleasure of presenting in Stockholm and Copenhagen this week, and (like Xcelsius, where many of RoamBI’s staff came from), it is a great attention-grabber, with everybody keen to try out the tools. You may even want to consider buying your CIO or other executive sponsor an iPad just for them to be able to show off your project’s data…

As an application, it’s particularly well-adapted for mobile users such as account managers, who typically need offline access to small sets of well-defined data, and could use it effectively not only for their own use, but to share key figures with their customers.

The enterprise version also supprts parameterized ad-hoc access to data, using standard Web Intelligence and Crystal report prompt definitions.

The only potential downsides to the product are:

First, that some setup is involved for enterprise use (choosing or creating an appropriate report, and choosing a form of analysis).

Second, that end user interaction, while very flexible, is set is advance (e.g. you can’t change from a pie chart to a time view, although most of the time you wouldn’t need to).*

Overall, RoamBI is an excellent “analytic consumption” tool for BusinessObjects and other data, that fits in perfectly with the iPad ethos.

If you have users that may sometimes need to venture out of prepared guidelines, a complementary solution would be BusinessObjects Explorer, which offers a flexible choice of dimensions, measures, and visualization types at run time (but which requires online access and doesn’t rival RoamBI’s look and feel)

Summary:

Pros

• Beautiful, easy-to-use user interface
• Fantastic marketing tool for your information systems
• Now with added analytical power (trending, time slices, etc.)
• The application and basic use is free
• Works offline
• Links to multiple personal and enterprise data systems including strong support for SAP BusinessObjects reports

Cons

• Visualization type (type of analytic) has to be defined in advance, not changeable.
• Report dimensions limited to the parameters already defined in the document*

* Section updated to correct earlier erroneous statement that you could only access data already in the local document — apologies…

I’ve already written extensively about the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer product, the Explorer in the cloud prototype (now a product, as part of BI OnDemand), and the Explorer for iPhone application.

Now all of these have come together to provide “instant value”. You simply sign up for a free account at the BI OnDemand website, upload any data set you want, and then consume easily and intuitively on the road using the free Explorer for iPhone application.

Here’s what it looks like in use:

Update: somebody asked how to get the data into BI ondemand. It’s covered in a previous post, but there’s also this video that shows it step by step:

And, of course, the iPad version is on its way — the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center just tweeted out a picture of an SAP employee taking a first look at the Explorer for iPad prototype. Follow them on Twitter to get the latest news!

These products, and many more examples of SAP / BusinessObjects Innovation, will be shown at the SAPPHIRENOW innovation campuses in Orlando and Frankfurt.

A recent cryptographic breakthrough made by Craig Gentry that potentially has huge consequences for business intelligence.

One of the big problems plaguing the use of on-demand business intelligence has been concerns over data security.

As Forbes and others have reported, the new techniques could reassure companies who want to take benefit of cloud computing for analysis (at a cost of massive computing power).

As IBM Research VP Charles Lickel notes in a blog post:

Using the solution could help strengthen the business model of “cloud computing,” where a computer vendor is entrusted to host the confidential data of others in a ubiquitous Internet presence. It might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients’ data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data.

The new techniques might also help in another area: extranet business intelligence. In today’s connected ecosystems of customer and partners, it’s essential to be able to share information for the good of all. But although extranets have been around since the earliest web-based BI tools, they are still not as widely used as one might expect.

There are several reasons for this – not least the ubiquitous data quality problems that companies are reluctant to expose outside the company’s firewall. But one big reason is that companies don’t necessarily trust their partners to look after the information.

Today, there aren’t great mechanisms in place for both sharing and protecting information. It’s easy to share information information outside the firewall using today’s web-based BI systems, or an on-demand platform like that of BusinessObjects. But how can you stop people from taking the information and using it elsewhere?

In many ways, this is analogous to letting people buy a CD, but not letting them make a digital copy of it. Although the music industry has tried to introduce and enforce digital rights management, it has proven woefully inadequate.

The health industry is a great example of the “data governance” issues that this problem creates. Individual health records are sacrosanct – nobody wants to have their colonoscopy results freely available on the web. But at the same time, being able to analyze the detailed data of large numbers of patient treatments and outcomes is essential if we’re going to improve medicine as a whole. So we have to be able to protect data and share it in aggregate, and various methods have been proposed to try to achieve this in bodies such as the UK’s national health service (which handily has a lot of data under its control, unlike the US health system).

Other example is industry data. Each participant in an industry benefits by having aggregate information about the industry as a whole, and a lot of middlemen and agencies have sprung up to collect information from companies (retailers, broadcasters, software companies, etc.) and then sell it back to them at a markup. In theory, these middlemen could be made obsolete, with people volunteering data to a central body, with strict controls on what data was made available to each participant. But too often, there isn’t enough trust, and no mechanism for associating payments with data value (this is what killed the “net market” phenomenon of the 90s).

Could encryption be part of the answer? I’m no expert, but so far, it seems like this particular breakthrough only applies directly to large-scale data mining issues, where you can do the analysis in “black box” fashion. The next step would be to allow companies to upload encrypted data sets that could still be linked at the raw data level (using some sort of public-key encryption?) – since this is what would be required for meaningful data analysis.

I’m convinced that we’re going to spend the next couple of decades on these problems – building the equivalent of the world’s monetary system (and look at the problems that has generated recently!) for data. Anything that can help, such as this encryption breakthrough is a step along the way…

It’s official: according to Gartner, as reported by Mary Hayes Weier in Information Week, business intelligence is indeed counter-cyclical (see earlier post on Why Will 2009 be a Great Year for Business Intelligence). Despite the tough economic climate, BI is growing at a healthy 22%, with SAP/Business Objects leading the pack with 24% of the market, or $2.1 billion in sales last year.

Here are the market shares, in Xcelsius: