Demystifying SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI
Context
Gartner this year published its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management suites. While the read was quite informative, I nevertheless decided to further investigate the alternative offerings available. Today, I’ll set out to demystify the latest release of SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI – SAP’s flagship BI suite.
As most of us know, in recent years we’ve seen a polarisation of BI capabilities. On the one side, there are the ‘big players’ such as SAP, Oracle and IBM – all having acquired their own BI suites. On the opposing side there are the ‘other players’ – who tend to differentiate themselves by offering free reporting suites, making their solution more industry-specific, or simply selling it for less.
The entry point: Crystal Reports 2008
SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI has an interesting go-to-market strategy. Many people will be familiar with Crystal Reports 2008, which can be purchased online from about £300. It offers a good starting point for any small business wanting to exploit information, but that does not rely on sophisticated distribution channels. As soon as the number of users grows and access becomes an issue, it is possible to upgrade to Crystal Reports Server Edition, for around £5,000.
Crystal Reports works directly with data, without relying on what SAP calls “Universes” – or what I call “Lenses”. However, for smaller businesses, it is essential that Server Edition users know what they are doing, or they’ll find themselves having to hire a Crystal Reports specialist to do it for them – together with the costs this would involve.
So what else?
Many small and medium businesses will realise that the costs of ‘unlocking insights’ might be too much of an act of faith, especially if they have to hire Crystal Reports consultants at £400 – £600 a day.
This is where SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI comes into its own. The cost is around £15,000 pounds, plus training and configuration, etc of about £10,000. This means that for a total of £25,000 you could be up and running with a scalable business intelligence suite that provides all your needs for your business, i.e. the following user groups would be well served:
- “The Execs”: who want real-time information as well as tactical and strategy insights in a form of interactive dashboards that operate offline as well as online
- “The Knowledge Workers”: who want to perform sophisticated analysis on data, without needing to know anything about programming or Crystal Reports
- “The information consumers”: who need to take decisions on information “pulled” by them or “pushed” to them
So how does SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI work?
Provided you have the desire to eliminate analysis spreadsheets and address distribution issues – as well as having a budget of at least £25,000 – £30,000 – you are able to benefit from a set of seven components that collectively form the SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI.
1. InfoView
All users who access the Business Objects application need InfoView to:
- Read reports
- Refresh reports (i.e. run them to get the latest information)
- Respond to prompts (by selecting from lists of values or by direct entry of parameters); multiple prompts are supported and may be cascaded (i.e. content of a selection list is dependent on the result of a previous prompt)
- Print reports
- Schedule reports for refresh and distribution to other users, including email
- Save reports to Excel and PDF
- Copy and paste to Excel
- Manage third party documents such as Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint within the portal
- Take part in threaded discussions with other users within the business intelligence portal (share comments on reports with other users)
- Send reports to email, file server, or to other users within the system
2. Web Intelligence
Web intelligence provides an intuitive interface that allows business analysts and non-technical users to ask spontaneous and iterative business questions of their data using their everyday business terms, drilling and slicing the data as desired. Web intelligence includes Voyager functionality for analysing SQL Server Analysis Service cubes.
3. Explorer
This new module delivers powerful data exploration and visualisation capabilities that guide users with no prior BI experience through the process of accessing, exploring, visualising and sharing data.
4. Live Office
Live Office integrates with Microsoft Office, embedding up-to-the-minute corporate data in PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. “Live” MS Office documents can be published to Business Objects Enterprise for sharing with co-workers.
5. Xcelcius
Xcelcius allows users to produce off-line interactive or ‘live’ dashboards using SWF file format (or Flash format). For instance, you can have embedded dials in your dashboard to allow users to explore the sensitivities of data, e.g. “If I increase the number of sales people, what is likely to be the increase in revenues and profit?”
6. Crystal Reports
Connect to virtually any source, design and format interactive reports, and share them internally and externally. Securely deliver and explore reports via SAP Business Objects, Crystal Reports Viewer and Microsoft Office documents.
7. Mobile
SAP Business Objects Mobile enables users to access BI reports, metrics and right-time data from a wireless device. The same content that users access on their desktops can be delivered to the mobile device, optimised for the smaller display format.
In summary…
Xcelcius is the starting point for executive users wanting an overview of performance. It sources the data from Web Intelligence or Live Office and is accessed through InfoView. If the user wants to embed dynamic data in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, they would normally do so using Live Office. Live Office is able to source information from Web Intelligence or a corresponding ‘universe’ created for that particular user group.
As mentioned earlier, universes are simply pre-set dimensions or lenses in which a user group will see the data (for example, it could be a geographical dimension, i.e. a user may only want to see the data for London or the South-East).
Web Intelligence feeds to both Live Office and Xcelsius, but can also allow more sophisticated users to perform advance querying, data mining and a range of analytics. Again, because the data is sourced from one or many ‘universes’, there is no need to be a DB expert or a specialised user, as is necessary with Crystal Reports.
Crystal Reports remains part of the SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI suite, as there are occasions when it is necessary to analyse data beyond the scope of the universes created. However, the majority of businesses investing in SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI will realise very quickly that they are able to perform virtually all tasks without having to rely on Crystal Reports, thus making considerable savings on consulting fees.
Finally, Explorer allows users to search the entire Business Objects suite. It allows users to take a serendipitous approach to finding what they need, simply by using keywords and ‘point and click’. The best example can be seen in the video produced by SAP below:
SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI – Explorer
I’m conscious for my readers that there’s a lot to take in here. Therefore, if you would like to learn more about SAP Business Objects Enterprise XI, please do not hesitate to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to help you decide whether this is the right solution for your organisation.
GEOJAN – performance management and business intelligence
Aligning people with performance
Tel: 020 3287 7620