Evolution of the BO XI platform – from XI R2 to XI 3.1 SP2

With BO XI 3.1 SP2 out in July this year, it is probably time to make a trip down the years to find out how the XI platform has evolved and matured.

The timeline:

• XI R2 SP2 – service pack release in March 2007 with productivity pack – QaaWS and LiveOffice connectors
• XI 3.0 – new major release in February 2008 – the first release after SAP acquired BOBJ in October 2007
• XI 3.1 – upgrade release in September 2008
• XI 3.1 SP2 – service pack release on 24 July 2009 – with enhanced SAP integration

Where were we with XI R2:

• Change to Crystal service-oriented platform (Crystal 10 architecture)
• Ability to plug Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence, OLAP Intelligence, Dashboard Manager, Performance Manager directly into the framework
• Single repository, security, system management, publishing, portal
• Infoview (Replaced old BO Infoview and Crystal ePortfolio)
• Central Management Console (CMC)
• Import Wizard (upgrades from BO 5, 6, XI, Crystal 8.5, 9, 10)
• Desktop Intelligence (new name for BO full client + ability to query and display Unicode data)
• Publishing, Encyclopedia, Discussions, OLAP Intelligence, Performance Management
• Changes to Data Integrator, Composer, Metadata Manager

XI 3.0 (Titan)

• All administration moved to the Central Management Console – CMC – with new GUI
• Bulk action support in CMC
• Central Configuration Manager – CCM is still there (to manage multiple nodes) with 2 entries : Tomcat & SIA
• Server Intelligence Agent (SIA) – handles service dependencies
• Server Intelligence in CMC – clone server deployments
• Repository Federation – replicate repository on other BO cluster
• Repository Diagnostic Tool (Infostore vs FileStore – repair inconsistencies between CMS database entries and files in FRS)
• Improved Import Wizard
• Web Intelligence Rich Client (offline viewing of WebI reports, no session timeout)
• Data change tracking in Web Intelligence
• Designer – “Database delegated” projection on measures
• Universe based on stored procedures
• Prompt syntax extension (persistent/primary_key undocumented features, finally!)
• Personal data provider – combine data from Excel, text, csv and get into a single report
• Smart cubes – support for non-additive measures (percentages, ratios) and RDBMS analytical functions
• Multi language support – dimensions, measures, prompts automatically localized to report viewer’s language
• Native Web Intelligence printing (without PDF)
• Enbed image in Web Intelligence report
• Hyperlinks dialog box makes links easy to create – syntax generated by WebIntelligence (remember opendocument()?)

What’s new in XI 3.1

• Support for multi-forest Active Directory authentication
• IP v6 support
• Lifecycle Management Tool (LCMBIAR files, replace Import Wizard)
• Saving Web Intelligence documents as CSV (data-only files) – new sheets for every 65K rows of data
• Web Intelligence Autosave
• “Begin_SQL” SQL prefix variable
• Prompt syntax extension (support for key-value pairs!)
• Business Objects Voyager enhancements
• Live Office enhancements
• WebIntelligence – Automatic loading of cached LOVs, interactive drag-drop, report filter bar, cancel refresh-on-open

What’s new in XI 3.1 SP2

• WebIntelligence Input controls
• OLAP universe based access to SAP BW using MDX
• BI services – expose WebIntelligence document components as web services
• Query on Query
• Fold-unfold UI improvements
• New SDKs – WebI Calculation Extension Points, Custom Data Provider plugin, Interactive viewing extension and integration points
• New universe SQL parameter SMART_AGGREGATE allows using most detailed aggregate tables
• @Prompt editor in universe Designer
• Backward compatibility is broken. Web Intelligence documents created using BO XI 3.1 SP2 cannot be opened in BO XI 3.1

In one of my next posts, I’ll cover selected new features in detail.

-Maloy

Change the location Google Desktop Search indexes your data

Desktop search has become an important component of our everyday work. With the amount of information explosion, it is only natural that users and enterprises move towards enabling desktop (and enterprise) search for users – subject of course to appropriate security and access controls. BI vendors have moved into this new business space that has opened up and seems to be one of the most promising. While Business Objects had announced support for the Google Search appliance and Google Desktop back in 2006, their most important announcement lately has been the launch of the Business Objects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) product. More about that in a later post…

Google Desktop Search is one of the most widely used desktop search appliances.  One would expect it to have an intelligent installer as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to either choose the installation directory or the location for the search index. It installs in your system drive without providing any means to modify it from the Options setting. This can be quite annoying and frustrating if your system drive is not set up with a huge amount of space, as the Google Desktop search index will expand soon and hog a lot of space (up to 2 GB) on the system drive. I will show a tip here on how you can get around this issue by modifying the location of the Google Desktop search index to change it from the default system drive and without having to rebuild the index.

1. Right click and exit Google Desktop.

2. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>Local Settings\Application Data\Google\<google desktop search>

Note: If you’re unable to see “Local Settings” – (it’s a hidden folder) – change your folder options from Tools – View – Show hidden files and folders.

3. Move the <google desktop search> folder to a different drive, e.g. D:\ Google Desktop\<google desktop search>

4. Open the Windows registry editor from Start – Run – typing regedit – Hit Enter.

5. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop.

6. Select the “data_dir” key in right pane, double-click to change its value to the new location of the <google desktop search index>

7. Exit the registry editor.

8. Restart Google Desktop Search.

SAP drops Business Objects Performance Management

In what seems to be a speedy decision to clean up an overlapping product line, following its acquisition of Business Objects (BOBJ), SAP has decided to retire the Business Objects Performance Management product.

Taking its place would be SAP Strategy Management (a product biguru is SAP certified). SAP Strategy Management is the new name for what used to be Pilot Software’s flagship product PilotWorks product, which SAP acquired in February 2007. No doubt about the fact that PilotWorks Server which is based on a powerful OLAP engine, and has an extremely user-friendly GUI on top of it, is a few notches above the clunky Performance Manager of BOBJ.

Another interesting part of the announcement was that SAP would keep alive the Outlooksoft product (rebranded as SAP Business Planning & Consolidation) while planning to retire Business Objects’ SRC Software (which BOBJ acquired in 2005) . At the same time, it would like to find out the consumers’ preference by offering both Cartesis and the Outlooksoft financial consolidation softwares.

It is a matter of conjecture, how far SAP will go in its decision to retire overlapping BI products. The Business Objects offerings have grown unwieldy over time and with increasing overlap between Crystal Reports and Business Objects Web Intelligence – the main two product lines have become a confusing choice. Add to this the direction shown by XI 3.0 with its Web Intelligence rich client, and Xcelsius 2008 going the Adobe Flex/Flash way. Business Objects however maintains that Web Intelligence remains for ad-hoc casual reporting over the web while Crystal Reports is for highly formatted reporting required for printing etc.

The SAP BI roadmap is available here.

And here is the SAP BI head (former BOBJ CEO) John Schwarz talking about the challenges of integration and independence.

SaaS BI – Software as a service model in Business Intelligence

SaaS has taken off in a big way in the past few years. And BI has not been lagging behind. For leading vendors like BOBJ (an SAP company) or Cognos (an IBM company), it’s going to be close to 2 years now since they started their SaaS BI.

What exactly are the advantages of SaaS over the traditional approach?

Benefits are aplenty, from zero costs of purchasing hardware, hiring of key IT personnel like system administrators and DBAs, to minimal implementation and maintenance costs. With CRM being made affordable to SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) by salesforce.com (note the huge success of its AppExchange), and the fact that large enterprise adoption of BI was complete, meant that the only scope for future growth in BI would come from upgrades of platforms (analogous to Microsoft’s Windows operating system – think of BOBJ upgrading from 6.5 to XI) or from expansion in the SME space with better offerings.
In fact, with Google distributing its Apps, Serena jumping on to the bandwagon with its project and portfolio management (PPM) software, and even Tata Consultancy Services launching its own ITaaS (IT as a service), SaaS is almost confirmed to be the software delivery model of the future.

The marginal cost of acquiring SME customers is reduced due to the nature of the SaaS service, and this has encouraged more and more BI companies to venture into exploring this delivery model for BI. There are niche players well entrenched in this SaaS BI space: LucidEra, Oco, Information Builders and PivotLink – and a few of them provide the entire range of BI – including ETL and not limited only to reporting. But now the bigger fish have also ventured into this space. Going by the success of BOBJ’s crystalreports.com or its Information OnDemand (a project which biguru was involved in developing) and IBM Cognos Now!, there seems no doubt over the future direction that BI delivery is headed. Did I mention almost all of these can work together with Salesforce?

As much as SaaS BI is redefining delivery mechanisms from the perspective of the vendors, it also involves a paradigm shift for the customers. Finally, it is less a question of technology, than it is about the benefits to the business, the ROI and focusing on the core competency of the enterprise. In a sense, SaaS ‘outsources’ all of the IT to the vendor, leaving business to deal with issues like implementation and managing requirements. It is also a pointer to the maturing of the industry – from discovering requirements to providing relevant information and insight.

The technology implications for the vendors are daunting. For once, they need to expand in domains outside their core areas, from maintaining data centers to ensuring bug-free roll-outs, even though they’ll also have the luxury of not having to maintain multiple version stacks. On the web, users become far more demanding, and are far less willing to break their heads while figuring out why something won’t work due to a missing dll or patch etc.

Improvements (both aesthetics, ease of use and navigation) in the user interface, as well as performance requirements have already seen a sort of standardization on Adobe Flash as the medium of delivery for dashboards. Even though AJAX/Javascript is also in the picture, the complexity of coding and longer cycle times seems to be tilting the scales in favor of Flash. As user experience gets paramount, BOBJ has launched its latest visualization offering Xcelsius 2008 (version 5) which also includes an SDK for interoperability with Adobe Flex, to build sites like Information OnDemand.
With BI getting more business-process centric, SAP is now focused on embedding BI capabilities in its range of offerings. Business Objects is currently tinkering with TAWS (Take Action as a Web Service) in its Labs, which would allow its dashboards to use web services to plug into the service-oriented-application-architecture. With respect to hot-plugging into the SOA architecture of BI, however, Oracle has made great strides and even IBM Cognos is better placed.

The future of SaaS BI and enterprise BI SOA seems interesting indeed.

Acquisitions in BI – End of the best of breed?

Last time I talked about the trends in the BI space. Let’s look into one of those trends – M&As and how it is shaping BI as we know it.
A recent BusinessWeek article claimed the end of the best-of-breed approach to BI with the demise of the major pure-play BI vendors like BOBJ now owned by SAP thanks to a friendly takeover or Hyperion acquired by Oracle or the latest – IBM’s acquisition of Cognos. While it is true that some of the major players have been acquired by the bigger businesses, there is no reason as to why the mid-size companies should go out of business.
For one, with the recent convergence of BI into the SOA (service oriented architecture), most pure-play vendors have hastened to upgrade their offerings, which means that there isn’t any single vendor which goes the entire distance in the BI-SOA convergence. Business Objects which introduced its web services add-on QAAWS for its dashboarding product Crystal Xcelsius, has now added support for embedding Xcelsius in its latest release of reporting products – Crystal Reports 2008. Yet to be acquired pure-play BI vendors like Actuate and MicroStrategy are adding SOA interoperability in product upgrades.
As is common in the technology industry, something disruptive always keeps happening. The latest trend riding on this disruption is the use of data warehousing appliances and the use of in-memory databases and in-memory calculations. From Netezza to QlikTech to Tableau, there is plenty happening in the BI innovations scenario which run counter to the forces set in motion by the big four (IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft).
The most convincing force against the consolidation spree is the fact that different vendors are better at different aspects of the entire BI space, so to build competency across the entire BI spectrum would require multiple acquisitions in a string-of-pearls approach along with subsequent costly integration and the resulting delays. It remains to be seen how IBM integrates Cognos’ offerings with its existing product lines, even as SAP has given BOBJ an independent run.

Best of breed works because there are investments with licensing of pure-play technologies which work with all the databases including IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s eponymous database, as well as the middle-ware from both SAP and Oracle, both of which have Java as the underlying open standard. With Oracle itself licensing Informatica in its data warehouse offerings, it is easy to see that it is not the end of the road for the smaller players as long as they stick to innovation, the technology credo.
Add to this mix the open source products from JasperSoft, Pentaho and Talend, and, best of breed does start sounding like the best value for money.