If you’re interested in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, you’ll find below the official key messages of today’s launch, which give a great summary of what’s important about the latest release, for customers with and without SAP ERP systems.

Big data in real-time

• Real-time analytics powered by In-memory computing
  • In-Memory Analytics (SAP HANA) – In-memory hardware appliance that is lightning fast on massively high-volumes of data. Enables business in the moment and to perform analysis on all data rather than a subset thereof.
  • IQ – Columnar analytics server designed to increase BI performance by 10x to 1000. Based on proven Sybase technology with more than 1900 customers worldwide.
• Event driven BI
  • Event Insight – Helps organizations continuously discover and understand complex business events by aggregating and distributing event details in real-time.
• 5X faster on SAP BW
  • BI Consumer Services (BICS) – Now all the BI clients will use the incredibly optimized and fast BICS connectivity to SAP BW.

Insight with confidence across business and social data

• Sentiment analysis enabling text data integration
  • Sentiment / Text analysis – Analyzes unstructured data sources like documents, email, blogs and twitter and summarizes the information into key sentiment that is surfaced throughout the content.
• Data governance and quality visibility
  • Information Steward – Empowers business and IT users with a single environment to discover, assess, define, monitor and improve the quality of their enterprise data assets.
• Easiest multi-source authoring
  • Multi-source universes – Whether it’s one source or hundreds, Universes can now include multiple sources making report authoring tremendously easier.

Instant, powerful BI in your hands

• Instant mobile BI
  • Mobility – Allow analytics to be delivered in a targeted fashion to any mobile device with stunning visual interactivity and smart search across the content. This is further enhanced by allowing all corporate data to be visible on the mobile device instantly through In-Memory analytics.
• Easy user experience for everyone
  • Simple and easy UI – BI 4.0 provides unparalleled usability for end-users, analysts and Administrators. New interactive visualizations, and menus are used consistently across the BI Suite (i.e., Web Intelligence, Explorer, Crystal, and Dashboards) ad-hoc analysis and report design are common across the BI suite with common use of the query panel and we can now support 1 to 1,000’s of data sources in a single universe.
• Embedded in your operations
  • Embedded analytics – Instantly deliver SAP BusinessObjects-based best-practice business content directly embedded in the SAP Business Suite to provide users with insights like never before.

Best fit, right size, right now

• The most deployment options
  • Amazon cloud – Deploy your BI solution using Amazon Web Service to roll solutions to anyone when needed without deploying costly hardware to do so.
  • Embedded analytics – Instantly deliver SAP BusinessObjects-based best-practice business content directly embedded in the SAP Business Suite to provide users with insights like never before. (Note, duplicated point, also under instant, powerful BI )
  • Analytic Applications – These flexible applications deliver insight and address a diverse set of industry-specific issues across disciplines including finance, sales, risk management, operations, patient care, strategic planning, customer retention, hydrocarbon operations, and military planning.
• The best cross-platform integration
  • BI and EIM Integration – With the industries only common platform for Information management and BI SAP uniquely enables users visibility from “data to dashboard” allowing both administrators and end-users to understand the full information lifecycle and evaluate the confidence level based on the source, timeliness and quality of the data they are seeing in BI.
  • Best integration and performance on SAP systems – BI 4.0 leverages native BW connectivity for unparalleled integration and speed on SAP BW. Also leverages SAP Solution manager, change /transport layer, and more.
• BI and EIM tuned to perfection
  • Optimized BI and EIM platform – Optimized for 64 bit, virtualization. New system monitoring, diagnostics and alerting to optimize deployments.
  • Best of breed EIM platform – Delivers operational ETL capabilities for data migrations and data quality both with and independent from BI projects.

Want more details? There are lots of more detailed resources available:

• BI/EIM 4.0 launch page on SAP Community Network
• What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.O
• Around 200 interactive BI 4.0 eLearning tutorials
• Check out the SAP BusinessObjects Community site
• BusinessObjects Forums, including new “Business Decision Making with BI” non-technical forum

The device runs Android 2.2, which supports Adobe Flash, so the first thing I tried was a couple of dashboards suitable for executives on the run, built using BusinessObjects Dashboard (formerly Xcelsius). First, the same Formula 1 example that I previously tried out on my Google Nexus One phone.

Then I loaded up a dashboard from Donald MacCormick, that uses his flashy Globe component:

I also would have liked to get the chance to try out the brand-new mobile dashboards functionality provided by Antivia, that makes it easy to provide a single Xcelsius dashboard that automatically adapts to a mobile interface – but Antivia CEO Mark Hudson has promised to post a video of the experience at some point.

Overall, the experience was generally very similar to the Nexus phone. The dashboards felt a little sluggish, especially when I was using the graphics-intensive transitions, but basic navigation worked fine.

There were a few differences compared to the Google Phone:

• Unlike with the Nexus, you couldn’t hold your finger down on the dashboard in the browser in order to maximize it to full screen size (and get rid of the top bar) – but you could pinch to zoom, and pan with your finger, which isn’t possible with my Nexus phone.
• The zooming and panning seemed a little tricky to use in the dashboard context (i.e. when you’re trying to avoid clicking on one of the buttons at the same time) – for example, I could zoom in on Donald’s Globe, but once I’d done so, I could no longer use a slide gesture to turn the globe – it was interpreted as a gesture to pan the whole dashboard instead. This would probably have been easier to use with a bit more practice, but it underlines that Flash isn’t yet really optimized for touch devices.
• Because of the larger screen size, it was much easier to click in the right place, making it feasible to use the same dashboard for the screen and for the mobile device.

Next, I tried out SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand. Since it uses a mixture of HTML and Flash, it worked very well – here’s the list of available reports once I logged on:

And here’s an example of a formatted report. Using a web-based reporting tool like Web Intelligence or Crystal Reports on a mobile device browser is a joy: the pinch and panning gestures work perfectly, making it easy to move around a big report and zoom in on the important details.

Overall, the size and form factor of the Galaxy Tab seemed like a good business compromise – much lighter and easier to stick in a pocket than the iPad, but with much more useable screen space than a mobile phone. It already works well for analytic interfaces that use HTML, and while the useability of the Flash-based dashboards isn’t perfect, it’s at least possible, unlike the iPad.

Personally, I chafe at the restrictions imposed by Apple on their devices (for example, it’s deliberately awkward to create and distribute prototypes of applications without signing their license agreements), and I hate every second I’m forced to use iTunes (I don’t have a Mac, and it’s a horrible, slow, bug-ridden experience using my PC).

So overall, I’m a strong candidate for Android-power devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and I’m sure I would use it more for business than the iPad, which I tend to find too underpowered and annoying for real work (e.g. the infuriating keyboard that forces you to go to a second screen just to type an apostrophe), and yet too bulky to put in a pocket to use on the move.

However, Android 2.2 doesn’t really seem to get the most out of the device. I’m looking forward to the next version of Android (“Gingerbread”), due out very shortly, which will be more optimized for tablet devices. With the new OS, Android-powered tablets like the Galaxy Tab should take their rightful place as serious business competitors to the iPad.

Here’s a fun UFO Tracker Dashboard from the zany folks at Reportalooza.com, designed by Josh Tapley using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) technology. It’s just one of several on the site that are part of the “Guest Challenge”, including cigar analytics and an overview of UK football – be sure to check them all out and vote for the winner!

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.

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)

In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account, and top performance is achieved by attaining the optimal mix. For example, when you’re sailing upwind, there’s a tradeoff between direction and speed. If you sail too close to the wind, you’ll go slowly. If you sail too far off the wind, you’ll go faster, but over a longer distance. The most effective course is between the two, where the combination of boat speed and direction generate the most windward velocity (“velocity made good”).

SAP has a great deal of experience helping with business analytics, and now the SAP BusinessObjects team are using that expertise to create a first set of sailing analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark.

For example, the Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius) visualization below shows the leader board of the fifth race. For each leg, the top ten boats are shown, with the time each arrived at the mark after the leader. The top bar allows you to change the icon size and color based on different criteria. By benchmarking their performance against others, the sailors can get insight into their performance.

For example, in the view above, we can see that crew of Napier and Cram in boat GBR 8701 came in 7th for the fifth leg (tacking upwind to the windward mark). But what’s interesting is that they achieved a higher top speed (6.21 km/h) than the #2, #3, #4 and #5 boats (the color and size of each icon shows the relative top speed compared to the other boats. So, as in the example above, the problem may be that they are sailing just a little too far off the wind compared to the leading boats (although of course sail racing is a lot more complicated than this simple example, and wind shifts, currents, and the tactical maneuvers of the other boats all play a huge part).

Here’s a selection of the analyses available on the analysis page of the official SAP 505 World Championship site:

	The Race Analysis Dashboard provides you with a quick view of the Leader Group and allows for comparison across several key measures at each Mark Rounding point. Using information like Velocity Made Good and Distance Traveled, sailors and spectators alike can put the knowledge behind the data to see which tactics were the leading ones on this day. Is it better to travel further into clean wind to gain speed, or does a tighter course bring the advantage in today’s conditions? Let’s find out together…. Race 2 Race 3 Race 4 Race 5
	The Leader Comparison Report gives the user the ability to compare key metrics across the Top 10 Racers for that Race. Comparing things such as Distance Travelled and Leg Time provides a quick view of how one team compares to the others in this group. Did they sail more distance in order to gain more speed with clean wind? By comparing these key statistics in the Leader Group, we begin to see the results of tactics and strategies and begin to understand the continuous refinement happening on the course. Open Leader Comparison Report
	Race Information Dashboard gives general information about the race, the competitors and the standings to date. See the current positions for the team members representing your home country as you become more hooked on 505 Racing! Open Race Information Dashboard

And here’s a bonus Xcelsius dashboard I put together that lets you find photos of the sailors and boats, by bow number, sail number, helm name, crew name, or country:

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 is a great boat and it offers the most competitive racing available. I love the 505,’ said Plattner.

‘Hasso Plattner and Peter Alarie (GER) Race 9, 2007 SAP 5O5 World Championships’ Sail-World.com /AUS ©

If you don’t know anything about 5O5 racing, a video is available that gives a great overview of last year’s 5O5 World sailing championship in San Francisco, including Hasso’s team:

SAP sponsors the event, and provides competitors with access to information that helps them understand their performance, and how it compares to the other teams. Here’s a interview with US 5O5 sailors earlier this year, on the impact of SAP solutions on their racing:

In particular, last year’s competitors had access to SAP BusinessObjects dashboards packed with information about the conditions of each race:

Ryan Goodman explained in a blog post last year  how they were created, using a a combination of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius), and the Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin:

“Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 5O5 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.”

“Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.”

The video below from SAP TV explains the solution in more detail:

Business Intelligence software and sailing – two worlds apart? Not at the SAP 5O5 world championship. For the first time ever, SAP is contributing solutions from the SAP Business Objects portfolio to support sailors. An exciting demonstration of the similarities of business and sailing.

This year’s pre-worlds championships started this week in Aarhus, Denmark. There will be 120 teams from 11 different nations attending and Joe King and his crack team of BusinessObjects technology experts are already on site, working on supporting the sailors’ analytic needs.

The official championship starts on Friday the 30th, and you will be able to follow the action live on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship 2010 web site: http://www.505sapworldchampionship2010.com/, and access the dashboard using the “SAP Analysis” button on the left hand side:

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”) directly from an Xcelsius dashboard.

The XWIS solution makes it easier to create dashboards containing live Web Intelligence data, complete with the ability to create new Web Intelligence queries without leaving the dashboard interface.

You can see various demonstrations of their product on their web site:

Mark Hudson, the founder of Antivia, provided me with a sample file formatted for a mobile device, and I can confirm that it’s a also great solution for mobile dashboards. Here’s a short video demonstration of the XWIS interface in action, on a Google Nexus One mobile phone running the latest version of Android, which supports Adobe Flash technology.

Here’s a more in-depth demonstration, showing off some of the key Antivia features (which also work, of course, on any regular PC that runs Adobe Flash). On the home page, I set up a browser bookmark (NOT an application) that calls a standard web page containing  the Antivia Xcelsius dashboard:

The dashboard is an Adobe Flash file, so I hold my finger on the screen for a few seconds to get the option to open it in full screen mode. The result: an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, with live data from a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence server:

Antivia makes it easy to set up interactions such as drill down to the next level:

Here’s what you get if you click on the “product analysis” button – you can of course use all the different Xcelsius graphical representations: pie charts, sparklines, etc. etc.

Clicking on a slice of the pie chart to get more details works perfectly on the mobile device:

In this section, I can drill down two levels and the rest of the model automatically updates:

The really powerful part is the ability to create complete new queries on the fly. I simply click on the “My Analysis” button, and create a new view:

The Antivia Xcelsius plugin makes it easy to provide a fully-fledged Web Intelligence query panel, directly within my Xcelsius Dashboard:

I can create any new question I want against the data warehouse, dragging and dropping my business terms that I want to see:

I can highlight objects and change their properties (aggregate as sum, average, etc.)

I can add new conditions and filters:

And I can add sorts:

To get the results, I simply click on the “view” button in the top right, to send it to the server, where it is converted to the SQL required to query the database, using the BusinessObjects semantic layer technology. The results are then brought back and displayed within the dashboard:

At any time, I can go back to the query definition — for example, in order to make it a crosstab (there’s also a “tree” option available, but this was the only Antivia feature I could find that didn’t seem to work correctly with the (beta) mobile version of Flash)

And here are the results in cross-tab format:

So, there you have it: a great solution that leverages any investment you’ve already made in Web Intelligence, and already works extremely well in mobile environments. Please contact Antivia if you’d like more information.

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 make them into slick, use-them-on-the-fly interfaces for your road warriors. Here’s a quick video demonstration of my Google Nexus One phone running Xcelsius, WebIntelligence, and Explorer, based on a Formula One data set (SAP is a sponsor of the Vodaphone McLaren Mercedes racing team, and the McLaren team use SAP’s PLM software).

Here’s a step-by-step picture view of the same demo:

1: open the xcelsius dashboard, using a bookmark link, or typing the dashboard link directly: http://assets.timoelliott.com/docs/formula1_android_open.swf

(Note: the Xcelsius icon below is NOT an application that you have to install, just a shortcut to the URL, which opens in a browser)

The flash file will open up in the browser:

To make it full screen, press and hold your finger on the flash file until the bar below appears

Then click on the left-hand icon to make the flash file full screen:

From here, you can explore the dashboard, for example, press the “Driver” button:

Or the “Engine” button:

You can also “drill through” to information using the other SAP BusinessObjects products. For example, touching the “Report” button can take you directly to a Web Intelligence report (this won’t work with the link above, because it’s a report only available to my account – the link takes you to the generic bi.ondemand.com page, and if you’re previously logged on – you can sign up for a free account – it will take you directly to your data sets, reports, etc.)

This report is rendered in HTML, and full interactable – all drill-downs, etc. will work, and you can use the standard “pinch” gestures to zoom into part of the report, scroll around, etc.:

Click on the “back” arrow on the phone (left-most icon on the bottom row of buttons on the phone) to get back to the previous dashboard (note, I occasionally came across a flash bug here, where the top bar would still appear, throwing off the tracking location of your finger. If this happens, hold your finger until the full screen icon appears, then click below it to get back to full screen)

Next, click on the “Explore button” to open a new pop-up window (you need to have enabled pop-ups in your browser options, or nothing will happen), and it will load an Explorer session with Formula One data (why do this via a pop-up? to make sure that the screen proportions are correct for the next step):

(Note: this data is stored on a corporate SAP server, but you can do the same thing using data you’ve uploaded to your free bi.ondemand.com account)

As before, hold down your finger and make the flash full screen:

This interface requires precision to use, but with a bit of practice, it’s feasible. Here, for example, I click on the pie chart icon to change the chart type:

Next, I click on the “Advanced” section under “Nationality” to get this window, and I chose “British”:

And by clicking on the little arrows to the left of the “Items to Select” section, you can expand it:

Or you can click on the little arrow to the left of “Visualize the data” to expand that part:

Here’s a copy of the Xcelsius dashboard I used (you can also download the flash and Xcelsius file) – the report button links to bi.ondemand.com, rather than the exact report, because I haven’t yet found a way to share it with everybody:

A few best-practice tips if you’re interested in recreating a demo like this:

• The screen size for the Google Nexus One is 480×800. When I designed the dashboard, I found I had to make the buttons and fonts extra-big in order to make them useable on the phone.
• To get a flash file to show full screen on your Android phone, simply press and hold. A bar will appear with a button to make the flash file full screen.
• Explorer automatically resizes to the available browser size available. Unfortunately, this means that even when you make it full screen, it doesn’t have the right proportions to fill the screen. I got around this by using a popup window set to 480×800, and enabling pop ups in the phone’s browser.
• Obviously, all this will be a lot easier as a new range of Android devices with larger screen sizes become more widely available, such as the French Archos 7 tablet

So. There you have it: Xcelsius, Web Intelligence and Explorer all running smoothly on your mobile device, no apps required!

Please share your best BusinessObjects-for-Android dashboards, reports and hints and tips, and I’ll put them in a follow-up post!

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 to pack in a lot more analytic ability. This video from Information Week shows Quinton Aslbury of RoamBI demonstrating what you can do, including additional data not included in the original documents, such as overlaid trending algorithms.

There is a series of videos available on the RoamBI web site that illustrate the different document types available.

View SAP Carbon Disclosure Data

SAP and RoamBI have partnered to provide easy access to information from SAP and the Carbon Disclosure Project. When you install the free application, it comes with a series of sample documents, including one that shows SAP’s carbon footprint data, showing progress towards SAP’s announced goal of reducing the company’s carbon footprint back down to 2000 levels by 2010.

It shows SAP’s carbon footprint for various categories (corporate cars, electricity for facilities, business flights, etc.), broken down by region (EMEA has to do the most work!)

To use your own data with the application, you register for an account on to the RoamBI Publisher web site and choose one of the available analytics. The free version lets you upload your local Excel spreadsheets, the Pro version expands access to online sources such as Google Spreadsheets, and the Enterprise Server lets you access your corporate BI documents.

Working with SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports documents

The RoamBI ES3 Enterprise Server option lets you use Web Intelligence documents and Crystal Reports from BusinessObjects Infoview as data sources for the analytics:

You simple log on to the Roam BI publisher web site, log onto your enterprise BI portal, and import the documents you’d like to see on the iPad:

Pricing

The basic version is free, the Pro app is $99 per user, and ES3 is $795 per user for a perpetual license with a minimum of 50 users.

Conclusion

First, if you’re the leader of a business intelligence project, this application is an essential part of marketing the value of your systems. I’ve had the pleasure of presenting in Stockholm and Copenhagen this week, and (like Xcelsius, where many of RoamBI’s staff came from), it is a great attention-grabber, with everybody keen to try out the tools. You may even want to consider buying your CIO or other executive sponsor an iPad just for them to be able to show off your project’s data…

As an application, it’s particularly well-adapted for mobile users such as account managers, who typically need offline access to small sets of well-defined data, and could use it effectively not only for their own use, but to share key figures with their customers.

The enterprise version also supprts parameterized ad-hoc access to data, using standard Web Intelligence and Crystal report prompt definitions.

The only potential downsides to the product are:

First, that some setup is involved for enterprise use (choosing or creating an appropriate report, and choosing a form of analysis).

Second, that end user interaction, while very flexible, is set is advance (e.g. you can’t change from a pie chart to a time view, although most of the time you wouldn’t need to).*

Overall, RoamBI is an excellent “analytic consumption” tool for BusinessObjects and other data, that fits in perfectly with the iPad ethos.

If you have users that may sometimes need to venture out of prepared guidelines, a complementary solution would be BusinessObjects Explorer, which offers a flexible choice of dimensions, measures, and visualization types at run time (but which requires online access and doesn’t rival RoamBI’s look and feel)

Summary:

Pros

• Beautiful, easy-to-use user interface
• Fantastic marketing tool for your information systems
• Now with added analytical power (trending, time slices, etc.)
• The application and basic use is free
• Works offline
• Links to multiple personal and enterprise data systems including strong support for SAP BusinessObjects reports

Cons

• Visualization type (type of analytic) has to be defined in advance, not changeable.
• Report dimensions limited to the parameters already defined in the document*

* Section updated to correct earlier erroneous statement that you could only access data already in the local document — apologies…