Analyze This – The SAP Way
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
On average the amount of data companies accumulate doubles every year, making it increasingly difficult to analyze this data in real time for strategically sound actionable insight. Regardless of your industry, or whether your data volume is measured in terabytes or petabytes, if you’re not aggressively exploring options to mine and analyze this valuable data to guide your business strategy, you’re most likely falling behind the competitive curve.
In addition to the challenges posed by ever-increasing data volume, many (probably most) companies must also grapple with data sprawl, that is, data stored across channels, applications, systems and warehouses. And as if this isn’t enough complexity, there’s also the difficulty posed by different data types – relational data, operational data, historical data, transactional data, unstructured data, etc.
While data volume, dispersal and disparity all contribute to the challenge of business analytics, the value gained by better understanding customer behavior, correctly assessing risk and optimizing network performance keeps the demand for business analytics growing strong among companies looking to sustain growth and sharpen their competitive edge.
According to a recent IDC Market Analysis Report, the business analytics market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% over the 2009-2014 forecast period with even greater growth expected over the next ten years. In line with this, 57% of IT decision makers responding to a recent CIO Magazine survey plan to increase spending on business intelligence and analytics over the coming year.
Responding to this strong and growing demand, SAP leads the way today in providing innovative approaches and solutions that make accurate, real-time business analytics attainable, affordable and manageable for companies of all sizes across all industries.
Most recently, at its TechEd 2010 conference in Las Vegas, SAP announced the November availability of its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA). Originally unveiled in May at SAPPHIRE, HANA combines SAP’s advanced in-memory technology with a powerful calculation engine and business-centric data modeling and data management tools that enable business users across the enterprise to instantaneously access, explore, model and analyze transactional, operational and Web-based data in real-time, in a single environment and on any device.
Also recently, at DEMO Fall 2010, SAP launched 10 new, industry-specific analytic applications (dubbed SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications) that were co-created with SAP customers.
By collaborating with its industry-leading customers, SAP has forged a new, faster approach for developing and delivering business analytics applications that provide knowledge workers across organizations with critical, industry-specific information wherever and however they want to use it.
SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications can be deployed in as little as eight weeks and are designed to work with structured or unstructured data from any SAP or non-SAP system.
If the goal of business analytics is to help companies run better, smarter and faster, then anywhere, anytime, anyone access to real-time analytics is paramount and, in tandem with this, mobility is key.
When combined with mobile platforms available from SAP partners like Vivido Labs and SAP’s own mobile tools, SAP’s HANA and SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications (existing and future) extend the power of accurate, insightful, real-time analytics to literally any employee with a smartphone.
