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 SAP dashboards should work on any device that supports the latest version of Adobe Flash (such as the Google Nexus One Phone) – although there’s currently no support for multi-touch operations (soon available in Flash, but it will be a while before this is integrated into the SAP dashboards).

UPDATE: You can even “adapt” existing Xcelsius Dashboards for iPhone/iPod use, now that Apple has been forced to accept conversion tools. See this SAP Community Network post from Miguel Figueiredo

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 Marks then did a keynote presentation on Risk Management, and the day broke out into track sessions with local customers and partners.

Here are some photos from the Event, and of Prague, on Flickr:

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:

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon01.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon02.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon03.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon04.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon05.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon06.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon07.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon08.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon09.png

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)

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon11.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon12.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon13.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon21.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon22.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon23.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon31.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon32.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/icon33.png

Then some miscellaneous icons

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconcircle.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconoffice.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconperson.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconperson_green.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconperson_red.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconstar.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconstar_green.png

http://sapweb20.com/blog/augreality/iconstar_red.png

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.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, I’m attending the SAP TechEd event in Berlin by watching the virtual TechEd stream, with live coverage of the main keynotes and interviews in key areas. You can watch a replay yourself on the Virtual TechEd site.

The session started off with the new (excellent) “run better” SAP ad, featuring a wide selection of SAP customers:

Mark Yolton then stepped up on stage to welcome the crowd and members of the SAP Community Network. He emphasized the importance of people and community at the event — 15,000 attendees across the four locations, with over a thousand hours of lectures and on-hands sessions.

Next up was SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, who kicked off with a message designed to combat the positioning of various SAP competitors including Oracle: “People are looking for solutions, not stacks”. It’s now about the ecosystem, and it’s not possible for an ecosystem to come together on a single stack. Organizations need “non-disruptive” change. A stable core is important, but there has to be continuous evolution on top.

Vishal reiterated some of the messages from previous years, including the notion of “timeless software”, that allows you to innovate even with older platforms.

Vishal emphasized the continuing importance of SAP NetWeaver: “It’s the foundation of what we do”. He went over some of the numbers: 18,000 NetWeaver customers, 10,000 using BW, and 6,000 using the SAP Portal, many with more than 100,000 users, including the SAP community network itself with over 2 million members. “It’s alive, it’s kicking, and the numbers tell us that it’s not only being used to run the core infrastructure, but also extending it to their non-SAP applications. It’s strategic to our customers, and so it’s strategic to us.”

Vishal then invited Bjoern Goerke, in charge of the SAP NetWeaver platform, to discuss the new NetWeaver 7.3, due out later this quarter.

Bjoern explained how the NetWeaver team were delivering innovation without disruption into existing landscapes. Everything is now on the same release level, worked hard on maintainability, scalability, and performance – for example, reducing the downtime needed to install enhancement packs from several hours down to just a few minutes.

Next Vishal talked about the importance of Business Intelligence, and the upcoming release of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (project name “Aurora”). For the first time, all the clients tools have a common look and feel, and there’s improved integration with SAP Netweaver (identity management, BW, etc.).

The next subject was mobility. With Sybase, SAP is now the clear leader in enterprise mobility. There are now more than 4 billion mobile devices in the world, and Sybase is essential to using them. Over 2 billion messages are sent through Sybase systems every day (SMS, etc.), and Sybase recently crossed the threshold of a trillion messages through their servers. And Sybase also brings other great technology – their CEP (complex event processing) platform, the ASA and IQ databases will all be integrated into the NetWeaver framework.

He then invited Sam Yen on stage to show you how NetWeaver, BusinessObjects, and Sybase can work together.

The demonstration scenario was a series of Norwegian oil rigs, where there are sensors recording almost 600,000 events per minute, but there’s very low bandwidth between the rigs and the central offices, so  a lot of the processing has to be locally, and intelligently.

Suddenly, the oil production drops, and we can see the information in real-time using an Xcelsius (now BusinessObjects Dashboards) dashboard.

Let’s drill into the detail. We can see that Gate A was in the danger zone, and has been shut down.

What’s going on behind the scenes? Here’s the CEP development environment, that lets people easily create and change the real-time events that they would like to track and monitor

This is a very real need in oil and gas organizations today, but it takes a lot of painful programming. Because these systems are connected to NetWeaver, people can have these types of dashboards, running on top of Event Insight, as part of their enterprise portal.

Sam demonstrated the new SAP Enterprise Workspace, that users can customize with their own content, without any help needed from IT.

For example, he added the previous Event Insight dashboard, by choosing from the available applications…

And then simply dragging and dropping the module into the workspace.

Users have full ability to customize their experience including information from the outside world, etc.

Another example could be choosing vendors based on their carbon footprint. We look at the list of vendors:

And then he added a a sustainability module, using the functionality available in Carbon Impact.

Here’s the current version of Carbon impact shown within the portal:

Soon, SAP will be extending this functionality, with some of the products from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, such as Social Intelligence, in this case used in order to find sustainability experts inside my organization. People can easily do a search:

Find out how they are related to the rest of the organization:

And then invite them into the Enterprise Workspace.

Sam explained that the same portal and content can be made available for business partners outside the organization – Enterprise Workspaces in the cloud:

Vishal Sikka then moved from the improvements to existing products, such as NetWeaver, and BusinessObjects, to “New Horizons”, the new possibilities available in the future, with cloud computing, mobility, and in-memory computing: “On the one hand, we need continuous evolution. On the other hand, there are new possibilities – how to we bring fundamentally new solutions to the existing landscapes?”

Vishal outlined three big changes to technology possibilities:

(1) Cloud. There have been advances not only virtualization, but also in the ability to provision new services in public clouds. We need have the integrity of existing systems, AND improve the ease of consumption. How can we do that?

SAP want to bring the benefits of cloud computing to everyone, and the flagship product is Business ByDesign, which is not only a full suite for mid-size companies, but also the basis of the applications that SAP will deliver in the cloud.

Having a cloud platform lets us build applications, such as SAP StreamWork for collaboration and Carbon Impact, which runs on the Amazon Cloud.

(2) Mobile. Mobile internet use is already seven times the use of broadband. There are lots of new devices poised to join the market, including the RIM “PlayBook”. Users want a great experience. Vishal: “The screens want to be liberated from the tyranny of the desktop!”. What is possible?

There’s the Sybase Unwired platform that allows you to write applications once and deploy them to multiple platforms. And beyond the mobile devices, there are other platforms, such as SharePoint, Facebook, and Lotus Notes. The Gateway project was designed to make it easier to access SAP applications from these environments, as well as existing SAP systems back to R3 v 4.6C. It will be generally available later this year – you can already sign up for the ramp up program.

Microsoft and Cap Gemini recently worked together on an HR system for Microsoft that used the new Gateway functionality.

Representatives of the two companies explained that it enabled them to easily and quickly implement a new HR hiring application – something that is a critical application for Microsoft.

They explained that the application took about one-sixth of the time it normally would have done to implement, thanks to the Gateway functionality.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give a demonstration of the technology working together

He showed the end to end traceability of the SAP application within a SharePoint portal:

He explained that Gateway makes it easy to consume SAP data, no matter what front end you are using – for example, using a Macintosh.

Sam showed how you could create and start consuming SAP data on an iPad in less than two minutes. First, you choose the data you want to expose:

And in what form you would like to expose it:

Then you can use the standard Apple environment to compile an application:

And make it available to the iPad – in this case a simple employee search using information from the SAP HR database:

The last topic was in-memory computing, described by Vishal as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

He explained that the current hardware possibilities were pretty much unimaginable ten years ago. With multi-core processing, software vendors have to rewrite their software to take advantage of parallelism, but once they have, the possibilities are amazing: real-time access to information, at a lower cost.

He gave an example of what’s possible, explaining that at a previous event in Berlin, in July, the CTO of one of the largest CPG companies in the world had challenged him to help them predict demand for their products at a row level – they had 460 billion records. Vishal put a team on it, and found that not only was it possible to access the data, it could be done 20x faster than anything the customer had previously tried. 460 billion records of data was about 45 terabytes. Compressed into a column database, it was around three to five terabytes. They put together a machine with ten server blades for around $530,000 using standard Intel parts.

The new HANA product is available for ramp up on November 30th, and he invited the audience to take part. One of the first customers is already in a pilot, running live. Vishal explained that the future direction is to “revitalize our entire product portfolio, starting with new applications – planning, forecasting, simulations”. He gave the example of utility companies using it to monitor and react to information from smart meters in real time.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give some examples.

The first was accessing over 4 billion rows of data in less than 0.03seconds, using HANA and the BusinessObjects Explorer front end.

The second example showed how you can get real-time access to live application data. He showed an SAP internal application for pipeline data. Here’s the initial view, seen on an iPad using BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad:

He then went into the SAP system to change some of the pipeline values, in a database containing half a million records. The data is then replicated to the HANA box in real-time using Sybase Replication services.

The simulation would normally take several hours to run, but now the data is reflected on the iPad in seconds:

Vishal finished with a high-level summary of the themes of his presentation: Innovation without disruption, through the new NetWeaver and BusinessObjects products, and the new possibilities afforded by the cloud, mobile use, and in-memory analytics.

SAP Portugal put on a great business intelligence event last week at the Oriental Museum in Lisbon (just up the road from the Belém Tower shown in my photo above). The sold-out event featured a series of great presentations from customers and partners – and a long (long!) networking lunch.

I was nursing a cold from the previous presentation in Zurich, but managed to get through the keynote presentation and journalist interviews before my voice degenerated into a strangled squeak.

Sadly, my Portuguese language skills are more or less non-existent (“bom dia! obrigado!”), so I wasn’t able to follow most of the presentations, but one of them, with slides in English, really grabbed my attention.

I’ve long been an advocate of IT organizations using business intelligence to optimize their own operations – because it’s a good idea (who could argue that IT isn’t an essential business function, or that it doesn’t need improving?), but also in order to provide a showcase to other organizations on how to use information effectively.

Ricardo Guerra of Volkswagen AutoEuropa gave a wonderful example of this. He explained how his organization uses a series of Xcelsius dashboards (soon to be renamed “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards”) to track every aspect of their IT operations, gathered across many different systems.

The beautifully-crafted dashboards (created by SAP partner Novabase) are displayed on monitors at key locations throughout the organization. The goals of the project were to give an overview of the health of the IT systems, highlight and anticipate problems, facilitate communication and service quality, and manage IT contracts.

Each team (IT coordination, helpdesk, infrastructure, network, etc.) has a customized dashboard adapted to their key metrics, and an overall dashboard gives a side-by-side comparison of the performance of different teams.

The benefits quoted by Ricardo are very impressive:

• Help desk: 22% reduction in abandoned calls and 95% reduction in the average wait time (for the same number of average staff)
• Incidents: 38% reduction in the incident queue, 25% increase in resolution time, more often fixed on first attempt
• Systems: 4.1% increase in systems availability (from 95.8% to 99.9%), identification of pre-failure conditions
• Viruses: 35% fewer virus incidents
• Average 25% increase in performance across all the different teams (in part through increased visibility and competition)

So impressive, in fact, that the solution has been chosen as a new Volkswagen standard, and is apparently being rolled out throughout the group.

Finally, here’s my keynote on some of the key trends in the future of business intelligence, available for download (very similar to previous blog posts)

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)

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

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.