SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Launch, Paris

The launch of BI 4.0 in Paris was one of the most interesting I’ve attended. It took place in the Salle Gaveau theatre in Paris on the afternoon of May 9th. In front of a packed crowd, journalist and editor Frédéric Simmottel of O1 Informatique welcomed everybody to the event.

He invited Laurent Leenhardt, director of Business Analytics in France, up on stage to discuss the agenda and outline the main themes of the show.

Next came a round-table interview with Hervé Couturier, R&D director for SAP, responsible for Business Analytics and SAP Research Labs, Eric Poutrin, in charge of BI strategy for Air France, and Laurent Gaultier, the BI director for Accenture France.

Air France explained that the company “sell a real time product and needs fast, simple to use, actionable info in the hands of operational managers”, emphasizing that data quality is essential, and that the KLM merger had been a great opportunity to work on a single vision for the group.

Two other videos followed. The first featured Bernard Liautaud, founder of BusinessObjects and now member of VC company Balderton Capital, and now on the SAP Supervisory Board, congratulating everybody on this first big release since the acquisition:

The second featured vignettes of BusinessObjects developers (a large part of the analytics development is done in the SAP BusinessObjects offices in Levallois, just outside of Paris) discussing what they liked about the new version (in French):

Next came the demonstration section, hosted by Vincent Taufflieb

First up was Christelle Romac demonstrating EIM 4.0

Then Florian Hamon did an end-to-end demonstration of BI 4.0

Then I talked about HANA (In-memory analytics), StreamWork (collaborative decision making), and Mobile BI

Here’s a copy of my slides, in Adobe PDF and PowerPoint format

Finally, Chahab Nastar of SAP Research showed some of the exciting new software.

First,text analytics (available now as part of EIM 4.0):

And then some prototypes that extend the technology, using it to let users ask questions, make it available on a mobile phone, with voice-to-text, etc:

He finished off with a short video of the new Dashi prototype that uses HTML5 to let people add and edit charts using simple gestures

The event ended with a cocktail and performance by artist Roberto d’Olbia

Here’s a selection of photos from the event, on Flickr

Article from Silicon.fr: SAP lance B0 4.0 en fanfare