Video: SAP Business ByDesign Made Simple

[UPDATED]. Apologies. This used to be a quick, irreverent overview of the brand-new cloud-based, software-as-a-service ERP offering from SAP, featuring the graphics you can see above. But the video was declared off-brand, and has been deleted from YouTube by SAP. The following video is offered instead, with all of the original humor deleted.  Read More →

SAP’s 12sprints Collaborative Decision-Making Prototype

You can now sign up to be a beta participant of SAP’s 12sprints project, “a collaborative environment for people to make better decisions based on data” or a “people-connecting, data-sharing, decision-making tool that actually sets work in motion.” Early versions of the prototype were glimpsed during demonstrations by Léo Apotheker and Ian Kimbell at SAP SAPPHIRE in Berlin last year, and by Marge Breya at SAP TechEd in Vienna, and the... [Read More...]

How to Easily Analyze Your Excel Data in the Cloud

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... [Read More...]

Interview with DecisionStats.com

Ajay Ohri of DecisionStats.com has a selection of interviews with people in the BI/analytics space, including James Taylor and John Fox, the creator of R Commander. Here’s an interview he did with me last week covering trends in predictive analytics, cloud computing, social network analysis, etc. Ajay- Describe your career in science from school to Senior Director in SAP to blogger/speaker. How do you think we can convince students of the benefits... [Read More...]

SAP’s Position on On-Demand, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing

The last few months has seen a lot of coverage of SAP’s directions on Web 2.0 technology including on-demand applications, social networking, and cloud computing. Here are some highlights, in the words of the leaders of these initiatives at SAP. On-Demand Phil Wainewright reported on SAP executive VP John Wookey’s presentation at the OnDemand Europe Conference in June: “On demand is the next stage in the evolution of application development... [Read More...]

SAP CTO Shares Web 2.0 Vision

In a recent interview with SearchSAP.com’s news editor Courtney Bjorlin, SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka explained that mobile applications, the cloud and virtualization will be key technologies in SAP’s product roadmap. Here are some key excerpts from the article: Entire economies going mobile in the next several years and companies running almost exclusively on mobile environments. So the way in which people access and support those applications... [Read More...]

BI As a Service: Ready to Explode?

A post by David Linthicum on the Intelligence Enterprise weblog called “SaaS Explodes…” has statistics on the growth of software as a service in large organizations that can give some hints about the future of BI as a service. It’s a cultural issue I wholeheartedly agree with David’s sentiments: “What’s significant is not that SaaS is growing, but that SaaS is gaining acceptance within businesses... [Read More...]