SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 General Availability

[updated post] As of August  30th, 2013, SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 is now generally available, 3 months ahead of plan.

What’s New in BI 4.1

BI 4.1 is one suite for all insight, one place for all information and on standard for enterprise BI. Here are the highlights of the new release – or you can skip to the end of the post to get a detailed technical presentation of the new features.

The features in this latest release include:

• Unified and highly personalized platform with improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Powerful visualizations that empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Big Data ready with support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive. Improved access to Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase. BI 4.1 also includes enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW
• Professional grade BI platform for any size business, any type of deployment and for any role across the organization

BI 4.1 includes features for all five areas of SAP BI innovation

One Suite for All Insight

 

 

One Place for All Information

One Standard for Enterprise BI

Three key types of information access: self-service, dashboards and apps, and reporting

New Self-Service Features

New Dashboarding Features

New Reporting Features

New Platform Features

What’s different about this release?

Summary of Key Messages for Business Objects 4.1

One strategy for enterprise BI: one suite for all insight, one place for all information, one standard for enterprise BI.

One Suite For All Insight

Unified and highly personalized

• Improved interoperability and usability across the BI suite
• Deliver engaging information to users when and where they need it
• Create custom experiences with embedded analytic extensions

Powerful visualizations

• Monitor your business with specialized charting and geospatial analytics
• Empower end users with industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics
• Detect outliers and discover areas to optimize your business

Faster more accurate decisions

• Create and consume BI content from any mobile device
• Empower teams to deliver collaborative decisions
• Simplified deployment to accelerate time to value

One Place For All Information

Big data ready

• Support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Hive
• Improved access to Oracle Exadata, Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase
• Enhanced workflow capabilities in conjunction with SAP HANA and BW

Scale and power

• Immediate response time regardless of data volume
• Improved usability to build pervasive BI applications
• Integrate with SAP monitoring, lifecycle management, search, and user management

Speed to deliver

• Enhanced design experience with new creation wizard and integrated data federation
• Improved Web Intelligence report design performance against BW
• Automated universe deployment and lifecycle management

One Standard For Enterprise BI

 

Professional grade BI platform

• For any size business, small to large
• For any type of deployment, on-premise or on-demand
• For anyone across the organization, individuals, teams, or department

Quality focused

• Increased efficiency to enhance decision making capability and productivity
• Non-disruptive production delivery and information governance across the organization
• Simplified architecture for increased IT responsiveness

Superior breadth of ecosystem

• Open and agnostic suite of products that can leverage existing BI investments
• Supported by global best practices for enhanced adoption
• Enable speedy deployment with shortened time to value

Key Links

• Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects BI Solutions
• BI4 Upgrade Resources
• How to Select the Right BI Tool for Your Environment
• Sizing and Deploying SAP BusinessObjects BI4
• eLearning product tutorials
• Road Maps on SAP Service Marketplace
• SAP’s Release Strategy for Major Releases of SAP BusinessObjects BI