Founder of the SaaS Showplace web site, THINKstrategies has an award program to recognize SaaS companies who are delivering solutions which produce measurable business benefits for their customers, including increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has just been named the latest winner of the award:

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is an intuitive, turnkey business intelligence solution that allows business people with no prior experience to explore, report and share information inside or outside the company. Because it’s on demand, SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand can be acquired and setup in minutes, without a long technology project. It’s available standalone or can integrate with existing on-premise or on-demand investments, delivering improved productivity and greater insight for more informed decision making.

A company experiencing the business benefits of SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is GENBAND, a Texas-based global supplier of next-generation IP infrastructure that also uses Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Angie Reese, GENBAND’s CRM application manager was looking for a business intelligence solution that would provide GENBAND with greater analytic capabilities and insight about its customers. By adopting SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, GENBAND has been able to generate powerful reports that can be more easily shared across its organization. The automated report-generation capabilities have saved GENBAND a minimum of eight to 10 hours per week in staff time. It has also been able to improve GENBAND’s sales tracking and customer service capabilities as the company grew rapidly from approximately 400 to 2,200 employees.

It is for these reasons that SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has been named a Best of SaaS Showplace Award winner.

A video of Angie talking about her experiences is available in the customer area of the OnDemand.com web site:

You can sign up for a free account and try BusinessObjects BI OnDemand at http://bi.ondemand.com

[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.

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.

Thanks to InformationWeek, here’s a quick demonstration by Jive Software’s Director of Analytics, Dan Short, that shows how Jive is using SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand to give their customers easy insight into social community growth.

And now Microsoft have launched their “Dallas” project, a variation on the same theme:

“Microsoft’s Information Services business, enabling developers and information workers to instantly find, purchase, and manage datasets to power the next set of applications—powered by premium content”

In today’s increasingly mashed-up world of analytics, let’s all hope that standards will emerge that will allow purchase and use of information from any data provider – so that any organization can choose to sell subsets of its information assets on the open market.

This will inevitably require big changes to data governance and authorization. How long before the copying and piracy problems that have beset the music industry start doing damage to business data sets?

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 … It is absolutely essential from SAP’s perspective that we embrace this change,” he said. “On-demand is what our customers are looking to invest in. If we do our job well and listen to our customers, these are the applications we have to be delivering. We have to drive to leadership in on-demand applications.”

Here’s a video of John Wookey and Mani Gil, Vice President of OnDemand at SAP BusinessObjects, discussing the conference:

Here’s a copy of John’s presentation:

Links

• Wall Street Journal: SAP to Make Online Software Push
• Financial Times: SAP reshapes strategy for online software
• Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: SAP Unveils SaaS Strategy
• Dennis Howlett: SAP’s John Wookey: the task ahead

Social Networking

A podcast from SearchSAP.com on how SAP’s Web 2.0 strategy makes way for social networking in business apps

“In that light, SearchSAP.com sat down with Zia Yusuf, executive vice president of SAP’s global ecosystem and partner group, and Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP community networks. In addition to managing strategy for SAP’s social networking sites like the SAP Developer Network (SDN), the two men play a role in what social networking tools may be integrated into SAP’s own software.

In this podcast, Yusuf and Yolton talk about SAP’s internal Web 2.0 strategy, including why sites like SDN have been successful and how SAP’s employees are using tools like Jive and CubeTree in their daily tasks. In turn, they discuss possible business scenarios in which tools like Twitter and LinkedIn could be integrated into SAP software.”

Cloud Computing

Information Week: SAP Sheds Light On Cloud Computing Plans

“In a keynote address and interview at the Interop Conference and Expo in Las Vegas on Tuesday, [SAP CTO Vishal Sikka] broadly outlined SAP’s cloud computing strategy and discussed the technical and business challenges the company needs to solve before doing things like ramping up the number of customers served by Business ByDesign.

SAP sees its opportunities in the cloud — which it seems to define very broadly as all Internet-based services — as threefold for now: enabling “business network service clouds” like iTunes that are powered by SAP Business Suite and Business Objects, complementary and integrated cloud-based services from SAP likeCRM On-Demand, and a mission-critical business application suite in Business ByDesign.”

Vishal’s slides:

Videos of Vishal talking about on current SAP strategy and technology trends:

Also see Vishal’s Timeless Software Blog.

SAP today announced new collaboration agreements that allow SAP Business ByDesign users to more easily leverage web services from third-party providers, including:

Business and investment news. Users can access investment research and other data from Hoover’s, Morningstar, and Business Wire, Google News, and Google Finance, and combine it with their own information about customers and suppliers.

Mapping and address services. Users can map and route customers, suppliers and other contacts using services from Google Maps, MapQuest.com, Navteq/Map24, and Falk online.

Search. Users can leverage Google Web Search, and Google Product Search, and GoYellow.de, a German service that allows reverse phone lookup functionality.

Further web services are planned to be introduced in the next release of Business By Design in Q3 of 2009.

Frustratingly, no information was available about the extent of integration with these services, and how customers could proceed. As Chris Kanaracus reported in his article SAP adds Web Services to Business by Design:

It wasn’t immediately clear how deep the integrations are between the services and BBD. This is a key point, said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

Just being able to call out to Google Maps from within the ERP suite has limited value, Wang said. But if the system could use sales data contained in BBD to create a “heat map” showing the hottest territories, “that would be pretty cool,” he said.

At some point more information may be available on Web Services area of the Business ByDesign marketplace (registration required). For now, it contains roughly the information as the press release.

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.

At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.

SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.

This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.

First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.

SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.

Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.

These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:

“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”

I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:

Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:

• When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
• Who has access to the system but is not using it?
• Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
• Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?

Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.

• Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
• What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
• Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
• Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
• Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
• Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?

Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:

• Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
• Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
• Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
• Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
• Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.

Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

You can download Jive Software’s “Social Business Imperative Manifesto” here. And any organizations interested in trying out the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand solutions can click here to sign up for a Starter edition account.

Links and Other Analysis

Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service: Jive, SAP Partner on ‘social BI’

Alex Goldman, InternetNews.com, SAP BusinessObjects integrates into Jive

Barb Mosher, CMS Wire, Jive Integrates SAP’s onDemand Business Intelligence Offerings

Oliver Marks, ZDNet Blogs: Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Susan Scrupski,  ITSInsider: And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event

According to the company web site, on-demand BI vendor LucidEra was formed:

“to shake up the stagnant business intelligence industry and traditional approaches to corporate information access and analysis by delivering business visibility as an on-demand service.”

And LucidEra has indeed been innovative, developing deep expertise in the area of Sales Pipeline analytics with a 48h Pipeline Healthcheck service that in the words of Phil Wainwright, aims to “deliver return *before* investment”:

“In just 48 hours the LucidEra Pipeline Healthcheck will identify opportunities and risks in your sales forecast. We’ll analyze the health of your pipeline, sales people, and overall sales process to help identify ways to increase revenues, decrease pipeline risk, and get more predictable sales results. Plus, we’ll provide an interactive analysis so you can dig deeper into the results. We’ll quantify the results of our findings and show you the impact that on-going business intelligence as a service can have on your sales revenues.”

But unfortunately it looks like the storm clouds may be gathering for the company. This weekend, LucidEra’s Founder and CMO Ken Rudin informed friends and colleagues that:

“my email address is changing and I am no longer using the email address krudin@lucidera.com”

And now competitor GoodData has put out a press release claiming that LucidEra is “offering to sell its intellectual property after almost four years of operations” and announcing a “program to offer existing LucidEra customers free access to its innovative on-demand analytics service” with six months of free access to applications.

There has been no confirmation (or denial) from LucidEra so far [update: see below]. If indeed it is the end of an era, there will inevitably be a post-mortem discussion of what factors led to the company’s problems, and what it says about the on-demand BI market in general – particularly since various surveys and analyst postings at the start of this year predicted a rosy future for business intelligence software as a service in 2009.

The current rumor is that the company’s problems are primarily a result of bad timing, with the company needing another round of financing in a tough market, despite good products and pipeline.

My position has always been that on-demand business intelligence is an essential part of the market, but that some of the claimed benefits have been over-hyped.

In particular, I don’t think the debate should be about about choosing between on-demand and on-premise: customers should be able to seamlessly and easily move between one and the other according to their needs, using the same technology platform. This has been the position with SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence on-demand offering (www.ondemand.com), that use the standard BusinessObjects platform, in the cloud, on a multi-tenancy platform.

In the meantime, let me point out that Darren Cunningham, LucidEra’s excellent VP of Marketing writes an interesting, entertaining, and valuable “Keep it Simple” blog, and Darren just posted the list of all-time most popular posts:

1. 9 Holes of Sales Analytics Best Practices
2. Sales Analytics for the Board of Directors
3. What is Your Data Actually Telling You?
4. SaaS BI – Analytic Aspirin in a Difficult Economy?
5. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2008
6. Guest Blogger Alert – The LucidEra Opportunity
7. We Couldn’t Get the Answers
8. Everything is a Platform
9. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2009
10. Transforming Marketing’s Traditional 4 P’s into SaaS’s 5 A’s
11. Take the SaaS BI Survey
12. Sales 2.0 Data Points and Anecdotes
13. Using Analytics to Avoid Wasting Time
14. The Call for Basic Numeracy
15. What is an Analytic Application?
16. What is Cloud Computing?
17. IDC Predictions for 2009
18. Ashe on SaaS
19. A Visionary Who Thinks Clouds will Cloud His Vision
20. The Power of Pie Charts

I wish all the best of luck to Ken, Darren, other employees and customers of LucidEra…

Update: the rumor is now confirmed:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) provider LucidEra will cease operations by the end of this month, a company executive has confirmed.

The vendor sent an email to customers on Thursday with the news and pledged to help customers wind down their relationship with the company and its SaaS-based BI products by the end of June, said Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing at LucidEra, in a phone interview.

LucidEra’s decision to shutdown was brought about by a lack of funding, not a lack of interest in its products or in SaaS BI on the whole, Cunningham said. He would not go into details regarding LucidEra’s financial problems other than to say, “It was a matter of funding or being acquired. And neither of those things happened.”

LucidEra’s prepackaged BI reports focus primarily on Salesforce.com-based data. The company’s last round of funding came nearly two years ago in August 2007, when it raised $15.6 million in Series B funding, according to LucidEra’s website.

With an easy-on-the-eyes flex-based interface, the store is designed to sell information on line that can be used to supplement internal data. Along with the Thomson Financial and Dun & Bradstreet sources already announced, the store features information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and… the eBay marketplace.

Courtesy of Advanced Economic Research Systems, inc., the eBay information is “accurate, up-to-date information based on over 6 billion consumer purchasing decisions from the over 240 million consumers that buy and sell on eBay’s global platform.” Models available in the new store include a Crystal Xcelsius model for state-to-state comparison of MP3 players by brand and a top 10 product comparison using Crystal Reports.

The rise of MP3 players is perhaps an apt analogy for the information on demand market. MP3 players had existed for quite a while before Apple came along with the easy-to-use iPod and unleashed the “everyday consumer” market. It achieved this by centralizing music from several different publishers and introducing revolutionary ease of use. And Apple managed it despite more obvious candidates, such as Walkman-pioneer Sony, because of misaligned incentives (Sony’s music division saw MP3 players as a threat, not an opportunity).

Information on demand is a market whose time has come. Commercial information has been around a long time, but until now hasn’t taken advantage of modern business intelligent infrastructures to make it easy for organizations to consume that information.

By providing an easy-to-use platform that centralizes information from different publishers, Business Objects is hoping to become the Apple iStore of information. With a large existing customer base, some level of success seems assured, but the real questions are how much new business can be generated, and how much of a head start Business Objects will be allowed before more competitors flood into the market.

The business market is never going to react as fast as consumer markets, but information on demand seems poised for explosive success if the right ingredients come together…