SAP: Bringing Intelligence to an Application Near You

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc

Business intelligence (BI) is red hot today, and for reasons more significant than the recent spate of high-profile vendor acquisitions. BI’s value is proven; its mettle is battle tested. For years now companies have leveraged BI and analytic software to make intelligent, timely business decisions that yield meaningful and measurable bottom-line results.

BI’s handicap, however, is that, historically, far too few people within a company have had access to these impactful, data-driven applications. SAP is on a mission to change this, making bold moves on multiple fronts to extend the power of BI throughout the enterprise—from the C level to the T (as in workers in the trench) level.

For starters, take SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects. The immediate impact of this merger is the bolstering of SAP’s BI offering for the finance group. But the long-term, and perhaps greater, significance of this deal lies in the confluence of transactional data and operational intelligence made possible by the merging of SAP and BOBJ’s respective technologies and products. More pointedly, the tools and technology acquired from Business Objects enable SAP to extend greater business intelligence to applications used on a daily basis by line-of-business workers—what SAP calls ‘information workers’— throughout a company.

Prior to being acquired by SAP, Business Objects’ mission and focus, according to James Thomas, the company’s vice president of BI content and tools, was on “getting BI out of the hands of the 10 to 15 percent of users that need it, to a much broader audience." For its part, SAP has been following a similar path—most notably with the recent creation of its Business User Group, a separate business unit within SAP tasked with developing and marketing BI applications for information workers.

It is not incidental that immediately following the official consummation of the SAP BOBJ merger, SAP moved its Business User Group under the control of the new Business Objects group, with the Business User Group reporting directly to Business Objects Chief Executive John Schwarz. Equally noteworthy is the application- and platform-agnostic underpinnings of Business Objects’ tools and technologies. When viewed against the backdrop of SAP’s numerous, concurrent information-worker product initiatives, the importance of this agnosticism cannot be underestimated.

In what is perhaps SAP’s most ambitious effort to expand its traditional user base, the joint SAP/Microsoft Duet offering, which debuted in May 2006, enables intuitive access to SAP reports and analytics from Microsoft Office productivity applications such as Outlook and Excel. The market share for Microsoft Office is currently pegged north of 95 percent.

More recently, SAP’s joint initiative with IBM, code-named ‘Atlantic,’ allows information workers throughout a company to access SAP applications through their Lotus Notes desktop client. The software will let users tap into SAP's applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through the Notes applications they currently use to access e-mail, calendars and instant messaging from a Lotus Domino server. According to IBM, more than 135 million people use its Lotus Notes software for unified communications and collaboration in the enterprise. Atlantic is expected to be available to customers in the fourth quarter of this year.

Additional noteworthy SAP information-worker initiatives include SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search, which helps information workers navigate critical business information by enabling seamless, secure access to SAP and non-SAP information and processes.

Understanding that search alone will not drive the greatest possible productivity gains for information workers, SAP has made several moves to add more analytic capability to its enterprise search offerng. To this end, SAP Ventures recently invested in Endeca, a company whose information access platform is built around a new class of access-optimized database that combines ease of searching and browsing with the analytical power of business intelligence.

On the mobility front, new SAP composite applications Mobile Sales xApp and Mobile Time and Travel xAPP enable mobile sales professionals to accelerate the sales cycle, increase visibility into sales opportunities and increase productivity for mobile sales and service professionals by giving them offline access to time-and-expense reporting. On top of this, although it is perhaps more sex than sizzle, SAP recently unveiled a version of its business software that will load sales contacts and other customer-account information onto the Apple’s iPhone.

Taken collectively, SAP’s many initiatives to allow information workers to access SAP business processes, data and BI applications through popular productivity tools and user interfaces is perhaps the greatest endeavor by any single, large enterprise application vendor to deliver improved process manageability and richer business insight to everyone in the organization.