What’s new in SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise BI 4.0 platform or BOXI 4.0 aka Aurora?

SAP BI 4.0 release (codenamed Aurora) has been the first major release of the BI platform since SAP acquired BusinessObjects. In this release, the semantic layer (universe layer for the uninitiated) has been re-worked completely to expose all business data under a single umbrella. The self-service BI portal (aka Infoview) has been revamped with a new AJAX based design and providing quicker and easier access to content. Publishing and distribution of BI content to mass audience has been made easier. There are also improvements to the lifecycle management (LCM tool) and platform administration (CMC, CCM) from a single console. This is in a nutshell are the changes that Aurora or SAP BO 4.0 bring, allowing BI content to be delivered across different channels ranging from the browser (BI Launch Pad, SharePoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal, Java Portal) to desktop (widgets), MS-Office and mobile.

In the following section I’ll try to cover the major changes that have been effected in the following products:

Semantic Layer - A new tool, Information Design Tool enhances the Universe Designer. The universes created by this tool are identified by the .UNX file extension and allow connections to multiple data sources.

The universe designer is still there. Renamed as universe design tool, it allows creating single data source universes (.UNV file extension) as before.

Conversion of previous universe .unv versions is supported only for relational universes created in previous universe designer versions and not possible for OLAP universes or universes based on stored procedures or Data Federator data source.

No authentication is required to start the information design tool. Users can create and edit unsecured resources (data foundations, business layers, connections) in local projects and publish them to the repository to make them secure.

Connections to relational data sources, OLAP data sources as well as SAP NetWeaver BEx query can be created, be local (saved locally as .cnx files) or secured (stored in the repository).

The newly named “Data foundations” are analogous to the schema browsers in Universe Designer. They contain the schema of relevant tables and joins from one or more relational databases that are used as a basis for one or more business layers.

The business layer is the universe metadata. Depending on the type of data source for the business layer, several types of objects e.g. folders, dimensions, analysis dimensions, measures, attributes, filters, hierarchies (OLAP only) can be created and edited in the business layer.

Search - enhancements include a new enhanced search engine allowing search by document attributes as well as content. Search results can be filtered and refined easily and the search GUI is integrated in the BI launch pad

There are also enhanced options through the OpenSearch API which enables integration with other search systems like Google Search Appliance, Microsoft SharePoint portal and NetWeaver Enterprise Search.

BI Portal - includes a new look re-designed web portal (InfoView) now called the BI LaunchPad providing a rich new user experience. It provides quick and easy access to BI applications and search, a handy list of recently used reports, scheduled documents, alerts etc., multiple tabs and pinning options, and a reduction in the manual steps for common tasks like:

• Ability to create new folder while Saving
• Schedule and Send To actions in Document viewers
• Auto-refresh in History page

Alerting, Monitoring & Auditing - The alerting framework allows triggering of alerts based on events (schedule completion, ETL completion, system monitoring etc.) or data conditions as also reactions to those events e.g. scheduling report to run or send notification message. Subscription to alerts is made easier with a consistent workflow, allowing notification emails or messages in the BI Launch Pad.

New monitoring applications are available to keep tabs on system health and performance (server metrics, custom probes, user-defined watch conditions, visualization dashboard in CMC) and integrate with infrastructure monitoring tools like Tivoli and SAP Solution Manager.

Auditing enhancements include simplified system wide configuration, auto-purging of old data and an enhanced audit store schema which simplifies reporting and application development.

Lifecycle Management - The LCM console replaces the import wizard. It allows connection override in bulk mode automatically, supports version control and rollback, is audit-able and provides scripting facility.

Upgrades and deployments - A new optimized upgrade management tool is provided, combining the best of Import Wizard and Database Migration tool in XI 3.x. This caters to one-click full upgrade or selective incremental upgrades, allowing direct upgrade from XI R2 SP2 or later. There’s enhanced scalability in deployment with virtualization and 64-bit support.

Analytics – out of the box: SAP Business Analytics

SAP finally announced on September 14, 2010 that it was getting onto the pre-packaged analytics bandwagon.  SAP announced ten applications in this first release for six industries (Consumer Products, Healthcare, Financial Services, Public Sector, Retail and Telecommunications) in its BusinessObjects  offering.

Building on the rapid-marts offering that the then BOBJ used to have and leveraging SAP’s industry and line of business expertise, these new applications are based on the SAP Business Objects XI platform – WebIntelligence, Crystal Reports and Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius). Bill McDermott, the joint CEO of SAP, described it as “complete and ready-to-go” and claimed the applications can be deployed in as less as eight weeks.

You may remember the brouhaha created by SAS last year , when it kicked off the controversy on Business Analytics being the future, rather than Business Intelligence. Going back even further, Oracle already had this in its Siebel Analytics pre-built analytic applications for various industries. Therefore, it would seem that SAP is already late in the game, but considering that neither Microsoft nor IBM have similar offerings, it may not be too bad for SAP. Better late than never…

Under the hood:

The pre-packaged analytic applications are based on the BusinessObjects XI platform – with the universe as the semantic layer or metadata model. It can be based on both SAP and non-SAP data, OLTP and data warehouse, relational and unstructured.  SAP would work with its partners HP and Teradata to optimize the analytic solutions on their hosting and data warehousing solutions.

Business Analytics dashboards are Xcelsius flash files which can be used with web services/QAWS to deliver real-time analytics. It may also be possible to use these with SAP Business Objects Explorer (formerly Polestar) and/or SAP BW Accelerator or the SAP high-performance analytic appliance (HANA).

Business Analytics vs. Business Intelligence – Revisiting the controversy:

When SAS created this controversy last year, an important point noted by many was the SAS home page titled:

SAS | Business Intelligence Software and Predictive Analytics

It’s important to see how the rebranding has reflected in a change to the SAS home page a year hence. It now reads:

SAS | Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Software

SAS Institute was always viewed as a niche vendor, operating in the pure-play statistical and predictive analytics space and this marketing was to re-brand SAS’ offerings to move it mainstream.  In effect, it signaled the market assessment by these major vendors, that in tough times, customers were seeking shorter lead times and demanding better tools which are quick and easy to introduce and provide quicker return on investment.  As we come around the downturn, with SAP still focusing on this segment, it is clear that traditional BI is clearly seen as complex, costly and difficult to implement.

Open questions:

There are several questions open at the moment, given that this is an initial launch. SAP plans to offer more applications over the next year-18 months in collaboration with customers and its partners.  The partners include Aster Group, Blueprint, Capgemini, Column5, CSC, Fusion Consulting, The Glenture Group, LSI Consulting and syskoplan and surely it would take quite a while for the ecosystem to develop.  It remains to be seen whether the prepackaged analytics catches on like Xcelsius dashboards did for BOBJ.

It is not clear whether the prepackaged analytics would be positioned at the bigger enterprises or the SME segment only, as its success could cannibalize revenues from the flagship Enterprise XI suite.

There are also questions around the scalability of the framework the analytic applications are built on. The extensibility APIs and reference architectures for partners to build their own add-ons and plugins / applications  of their own is not yet out (planned in 2011), so it’s not quite like the iPhone/iPad app store yet. It is also not clear how customizations to the applications would be supported or to what extent these could be customized.  The long awaited universe rewrite including data federation might be a part of plans if the analytic applications turn out to be truly backend-agnostic and do support future in-memory data structures (SAP’s acquisition of Sybase would indicate likely support for the Sybase ASE in-memory database). If this happens, it would be in line with earlier plans to roll-out in-memory EPM and OLTP solutions.

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

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.