Sailing Analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship
In business, we often talk about the difference between efficiency (“doing it right”) and effectiveness (“doing the right thing”). And in today’s fast-changing markets, there’s often a tradeoff involved, where if you optimize any particular measure in the short term you may suffer in the longer term (e.g. if you optimize profitability by not investing in new products). In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account,... [Read More...]
An Introduction to the SAP 5O5 World Sailing Championships 2010
There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet: For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505... [Read More...]
Antivia Xcelsius Business Intelligence Dashboard with Web Intelligence Drill
In an earlier post, I showed you can use BusinessObjects products like Xcelsius, Explorer on a mobile phone, and drill through to Web Intelligence running on the bi.ondemand.com BI-in-the-cloud platform. This post takes things one step further, with the help of SAP BusinessObjects partner Antivia. They have a great add-on solution called XWIS that makes it easier to access real-time Web Intelligence (soon to be called “Interactive Analysis”)... [Read More...]
Xcelsius Dashboards on Your Android Mobile Phone
The latest release of Android, v2.2 (“Froyo”) supports the Adobe flash technology used by Xcelsius (now called Dashboard Design) and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. So now you can access your dashboards, reports, and exploration spaces directly from your mobile device without requiring a separate application (e.g. as you do for the iPhone and iPad). It also means you can reuse all the effort you’ve put into developing Xcelsius dashboards and... [Read More...]
RoamBI – Beautiful Mobile BI for the iPad
RoamBI for iPhone, which I reviewed last year, has long been the best-looking mobile BI application available in the market. Now the folks at RoamBI have been one of the very first vendors worldwide to come out with an updated application for the iPad, and they provided me with one in order to test their brand-new version. First Impressions It’s as beautiful as its predecessor, and the new document formats available use the new expanded workspace... [Read More...]
Istanbul SAP BusinessObjects BI Forum Keynote
Turkey is investing heavily in business intelligence. It was SAP’s 2nd-fastest growing region worldwide last year. Nine out of the top 10 Turkish banks use BusinessObjects, and 3 out of the top 4 telecom companies. I presented the keynote presentation at the SAP BusinessObjects BI Forum in Istanbul this morning, on the theme “The Clear Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic”. It covers the current trends in the... [Read More...]
Clear Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic
Please find below my presentation from today’s Gartner BI Summit EMEA in London. If you were there, thanks for attending, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! You can download a pdf version here and the full PowerPoint file, including the Xcelsius dashboards here. Update: You can see a screencam recording of this presentation here. Read More →
Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!
Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute. How it works: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]
What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 SP3?
Here’s a summary of some of the new things in the latest version of Xcelsius 2008. I’ve borrowed liberally from the official documentation that you can download, along with the program, here. New Components Sparkline chart components. The new Sparkline chart is based on the Sparkline chart created by Edward Tufte and provides a method for displaying a one-dimensional range of numeric data in a way that is dense, takes up a small space, and can... [Read More...]
Real Real-Time Analytics
Here’s a great video from this weeks SAP Influencer Summit featuring the advantages of real-time, in-memory analytics. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in business intelligence and analytics, you’ll find it mentioned in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Vishal Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey. The sessions featured interaction with Twitter very heavily, using the... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
