AFSUG Business Intelligence Special Interest Group

I had the honor of presenting to the African SAP user group BI special interest group this week at the SAP South Africa offices in Woodmead, near Johannesburg. The session was very popular, with people having to be turned away because of lack of room. Folks in Cape Town and Durban joined the by teleconference — which meant we weren’t allowed to stray from the fixed microphone!

My session was covered “BusinessAnalytics in 2011: The Great Leap Forward” – an updated version of the presentations I gave at the ITWeb BI Summit and Gartner BI Europe, but including more information about SAP’s products and plans that match the new architecture possibilities. I took the opportunity to update the slides to avoid some of the misconceptions around in-memory computing: for example, it does NOT mean that data warehousing is no longer needed. You can download my presentation as either a pdf file or a PowerPoint file.

Next, Bruno Schneider of Standard Bank get an overview of how the company uses SAP BusinessObjects to report on risk and financial reporting throughout the organization.

And Michael Jones of SAP gave a preview demo of some of the key features of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0.

Here are some other photos from the event, from Flickr — view slideshow.

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