SAP BusinessObjects Mobile BI Directions

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... [Read More...]

The Essential Guide to BI @ SAP SAPPHIRE NOW

As a 19-year veteran of SAP BusinessObjects, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to be a “social ambassador” for business intelligence and analytics for SAPPHIRE NOW in Frankfurt. Whether or not you have any SAP products, and whether or not you’ll be attending the physical events, there’s going to be lots of great new information of interest to anybody involved with business intelligence and performance management. My job will be to help... [Read More...]

SAPPHIRE 09 Virtual Event

This is the part of a series of posts looking at Web 2.0 technology in conjunction with last week’s SAPPHIRE ‘09 event in Orlando, Florida. This post looks at using the latest technologies to expand the reach of SAPPHIRE far beyond just the people physically attending. In the last six months, SAP has extensively tested virtual meetings inside the company, for example using the inXpo platform for over 10,000 employees in place of the traditional... [Read More...]

Jonathan Becher's SAPPHIRE 09 Blog

Jonathan Becher, SVP Marketing for SAP (and my boss), wrote a series of blog postings about the recent SAPPHIRE event. Since these were part of the “Insights at SAPPHIRE” event on the inXpo platform, and the event is now closed, they are no longer accessible. This didn’t strike me a very Web 2.0 result (indeed, I believe this is one big downside of the closed InXpo approach), and we are in the process of figuring out what it would take to get... [Read More...]

The Inevitable Wolfram|Alpha Problem: Semantics

Now that Wolfram|Alpha has launched, I thought I’d go take a look. After failing to find out the average happiness of France vs US (not a supported database yet, apparently), I tried out some of the examples and then checked out the “community” area. Inevitably, Wolfram|Alpha suffers from the same problems that have plagued every attempt to provide answers to human questions using technology since the dawn of computers: semantics, and specifically... [Read More...]

Want to Experience SAP BusinessObjects Explorer? Try This Micro-Finance Demo!

As I mentioned in the previous post, SAP launched the new BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated product today. You can try out the product and learn how microfinance is helping reduce global poverty by visiting the excellent SAP BusinessObjects Explorer demo at http://microfinance.sap.com. It will challenge you to find answers to a few questions, and you’ll be able to do so, quickly and easily, without any training, using the intuitive new Explorer... [Read More...]

A New Data Architecture for Faster, Better BI: SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

Today at the SAPPHIRE user conference in Orlando, SAP announced it would “revolutionize BI with a new solution that delivers insight at the speed of thought”. The new package is called SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated, and it combines the search and visualization capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects Polestar (now renamed SAP BusinessObjects Explorer) with SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). Photo: SAP CEO Léo Apotheker showing that... [Read More...]

SAP BusinessObjects @ SAPPHIRE US ‘09

Over ten thousand people are expected at SAPPHIRE user conference next week in Orlando. Here’s an overview of some of the ways SAP BusinessObjects will be featured at the event: Show floor. The SAPPHIRE show floor is primarily organized by industry and functional area, and so SAP BusinessObjects will be featured throughout the exhibition, at 58 different pods in total. If you’re interested in getting a traditional, product-oriented view of the... [Read More...]

Delivering Results with Business Intelligence

Here’s one of the presentations I gave at Sapphire last month. It is a high-level, introductory overview that covers key business intelligence themes and how to overcome the major barriers to successful deployments: data integration, ease of use, and cost of deployment. It is illustrated (inevitably) with examples of Business Objects technology. Link to a PDF version of the presentation Link to the PPT file (15mb)  Read More →

SAPPHIRE Berlin

It’s SAPPHIRE Berlin next week — I’ll be giving presentations on “Why BI Projects Fail And What To Do About It” and “Delivering Results with Business Intelligence“ Since the theme of the SAP / Business Objects combination is fixing the gap between strategy and execution, a quick Berlin-appropriate cartoon:  Read More →