BI OnDemand Wins Best of SaaS Award

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... [Read More...]

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 →

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...]

SAP Business By Design Adds Third-Party Web Services

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... [Read More...]

End of a LucidEra?

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,... [Read More...]

OnDemand Information Browsing — Was Malcolm Gladwell Right?

SAP BusinessObjects Polestar, introduced last year, provided a new way of "browsing" available information, without having to explicitly create queries. Now the SAP BusinessObjects Lab team have introduced a preview of Polestar OnDemand that allows you to upload any data set you like and then interactively browse through the information. It’s part of an overall approach to combine the best of on-premise and SAAS BI into a single combined... [Read More...]

eBay Information on Demand

I’ve written before about the increasing importance of external data and benchmarking for the future of business intelligence. Business Objects today announced the launch of their information on demand store: 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... [Read More...]

The Top 6 On-Demand BI Confusions

I’m a big believer in the future of on-demand BI, and yes, it’s hot.  But a lot of the articles promoting on-demand BI don’t always separate fact from self-interested fiction. Here’s my attempt to redress the balance. 1. On-Demand = Subscription Pricing = Mid-Market There are three different axes that are often discussed as if they overlapped: on-premise vs. on-demand perpetual license vs. subscription license enterprise... [Read More...]