SAP Mobility & The BI Long Tail
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
Commenting on the unpredictable nature of business, Warren Buffet notes that the rearview mirror is often clearer than the windshield. Notwithstanding Buffet’s wisdom, a rearview-mirror approach to running a business ensures only missed opportunities, competitive vulnerability and costly collisions.
To map and steer a winning course businesses need a clear, 360-degree view of immediate conditions and an unobstructed view of the road ahead, as well as an accurate picture of where they’ve been. Hence, the strong and growing demand for Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions.
BI has been a bright spot over the past few years in an otherwise dreary IT market, notching double-digit growth despite tough economic conditions. The global BI market is projected to reach $13B by 2013 from $8.4B in 2008, according to a recent Business Intelligence report. IDC pegs the 2009 market for BI at $8.1B and forecasts a 6.9% CAPG through 2014, where it will reach $11.4B. (IDC measures the BI and Advanced Analytics markets separately.)
SAP cemented its BI leadership with the acquisition of BusinessObjects in 2007. Over the ensuing years, SAP has made great progress integrating BusinessObjects BI solutions and SAP Business Suite applications. SAP incorporates select BusinessObjects BI and analytics capabilities into SAP Business Suite 7, which SAP released in 2009, the same year Gartner ranked SAP the BI leader, accounting for 22% of the market.
SAP’s product development and market growth strategies moving forward hinge heavily on extending the scope and reach of its BI and analytics solutions, and increasing the number of people within an organization who utilize SAP applications.
SAP is committed to uniting enterprise applications and business intelligence, and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott has publicly stated SAP’s ambitious user-base growth goal of one billion users by 2015. (SAP currently has approximately 35 million users.)
Mobility is key to SAP achieving its end-user growth goal, and SAP has made enterprise mobility a top priority as evidenced by its $5.8 billion acquisition of Sybase. In acquiring Sybase, McDermott points out, SAP will greatly expand its addressable market by making its solutions available to “hundreds of millions of mobile users.”
The confluence of mobility and BI is arguably one of the richest growth areas for SAP, in terms of both BI adoption and increasing end users, and in May at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP unveiled its breakthrough solution for exploiting the rich mix of mobility and BI with the announcement of the SAP Analytic Engine.
Slated for availability later this year, the SAP Business Analytic Engine is a BI game-changer that leverages in-memory technology to eliminate the traditional barriers to widespread BI uptake -- cost, complexity, speed and desktop dependency.
Optimized for real-time BI, the SAP Analytic Engine draws data from operational systems, data warehouses, real-time transactional systems and the Web; stores and processes this information in-memory (as opposed to on disks in traditional databases); and performs BI queries and analytics 100x – 1,000x faster and at a fraction of the cost of BI systems connected to traditional databases.
In-memory technology and the proliferation of smartphones mark a transformational moment in how BI is consumed within the enterprise, in essence, providing BI and analytics with a long tail of enterprise end-users. When combined with the Sybase Mobile Platform and mobile platforms available from SAP partners like Vivido Labs, the SAP Business Analytic Engine extends BI and analytics to literally any employee with a smartphone, blows open the range of possible BI applications, and greatly increases the business value BI delivers.
By eliminating the gap between operational (historic) and transactional (real-time) data, the SAP Analytics Engine takes BI and predictive analytics to an entirely new level, providing real-time decision-making support for C-level execs and frontline workers who now have ad hoc reporting, modeling and analytical capabilities whenever and wherever needed.
For a business to thrive in today’s always-on environment, everyone in the company -- from C-level execs to frontline workers --must routinely make fast, strategically sound, on-the-spot decisions. Now, armed with a smartphone, any worker can pull, combine and model data from virtually any source to ensure he/she makes correct business decisions, averts crises and executes opportunistic business strategy.
Now that SAP has made BI and analytics mobile, ubiquitous, flexible, affordable and fast, its use and value are sure to grow exponentially over the years ahead.
