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.

What’s new in Xcelsius 2008 – Top 10 features

Business Objects has just released the updated Xcelsius 2008 after a long beta program. What are the top new features of this exciting data visualization and dashboard tool? Let’s find out the top 10:

1. Copy-Paste - Productivity is bound to increase through collaborative development now as it is possible to copy-paste components between XLF files.

2. Filtered Rows – Selector components like List box and combo-box now include a new option in the insert-options list. This is the “Filtered rows” option, automatically removing duplicates. In the previous version, this worked only with the Filter component.

3. Color-scheme – The new-look Xcelsius 2008 has some amazing pre-built color schemes, including “auto-matching” of colors and allowing color configuration of backgrounds, text, buttons, charts, selectors, single value components, maps and scroll bars. A notch above the existing Xcelsius with its garish and glossy color schemes. 3 new themes – Admiral, iTheme and Nova have also been added to the existing set.

4. History component – This is a very useful new feature which captures a single-cell value and inserts it into a contiguous row/column of data, thus allowing the designer to track changes based on data refreshes, user selections etc. Used with XML Data connection, this can be used for exporting data snapshots out of Xcelsius.

5. Trend Analyzer component – This component automatically inserts linear, logarithmic calculations into charts, tables, and other components at runtime. You can choose the order of the polynomial. Alternatively, you can let Xcelsius decide the best fit for the trend.

6. Dual Y-Axis option – A long standing wish of the Xcelsius developer community, the secondary axis charting has now been made available on line, column, stacked column, bar, stacked bar, combination, chart, area, and stacked area charts. Earlier, the workarounds included using multiple copies of the chart and overlaying them with clever formatting and dynamic visibility.

7. Alerts in selector components – This feature allows configuring selectors e.g. combo-box, list-box etc to display alerts icon for each label. It also has a new “Middle values are good” option for percent alerts in the color-order section.

8. Data Manager – A redesigned development interface now includes a new Data Manager, which consolidates the various possible external data sources including QaaWS, XML data, portal, Live Office, XML maps, flash variables, crystal reports, Adobe Life cycle data services and web services. There is also a general option available to import data from a spreadsheet in the Business Objects Enterprise.

9. Slick new IDE – The new IDE is created using Adobe Flex and includes an embedded Excel sheet which improves productivity by allowing the designer to make changes to the model within the IDE, rather than Alt-Tab-bing between Excel and Xcelsius. There are several one-touch Quick-views available – the integrated workspace, canvas only, Excel only and both canvas-and-Excel. And all those floating bars can be pinned or auto-hidden. While dragging and dropping, scroll arrows appear over the toolbars, and it takes a little while to adjust to the way you can dock these bars.

10. Component management – Has been made easier in that you can select individual components within a group and modify its properties, including sending it back or forward within the group. Hiding and locking of components and groups have also been made very easy.

What’s more:

* It is no longer a pain to go through the uninstall-reinstall process to add a license. You can update your trial by entering the license from Help – License Manager.

* New containers like the Panel component with scroll bars and the Tab component make it easy to build component-heavy visualizations without having to worry too much about precious screen space or rely too much on dynamic visibility.

* You can build your own custom components using Adobe Flex with the Xcelsius SDK.

Get the Xcelsius 2008 with a 60 day developer keycode at Diamond where you can also download the Xcelsius 2008 Component SDK.

What’s less:

* Even with the redesign, Xcelsius retains its memory-hogging issues. A blank XLF with an embedded Excel easily takes up around 300 MB RAM, out of which 80MB is of the Excel alone.

* A Switch-To/Retry dialog is common during launching Xcelsius, so much so that hiding it has been made a part of File – Preferences – Excel Options – “Always Hide” checkbox.

* The Export icons are difficult to make sense of and have inconsistent tool-tips (Powerpoint, PDF and Word do not have any, while Outlook and Business Objects platform do.)

* Installation is to “C:\Program Files\” by default without letting you select any location. If you wish to change the location, you’ll need to modify a registry entry as David Taylor points out in his blog.

I hope to tinker around a bit more with the new look Xcelsius 2008 and find out how it does in the performance and scalability departments – aspects which become increasingly important gaging by the enthusiasm of enterprises embracing it as a tool for dashboards and scorecards.

~biguru

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.