SAP has enhanced business intelligence (BI) applications which will help customers turn big tata into intelligent data to gather business insights from them.
The company has introduced new capabilities in feature pack 3 of the SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence 4.0 software suite that includes SAP BusinessObjects BI, Edge edition for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs)
It also introduced the 1.0.1 release of SAP Visual Intelligence software, which will enable organisations provide users with analytics tools that are easy to use.
Feature pack 3 for the 4.0 release of SAP BusinessObjects BI applications now include capabilities to support for mobile devices including Android devices and mobile BI for iPhone.
Direct access to critical reports and metrics on employee’s mobile devices will help organisations mobilise information assets in a collaborative, self-service environment.
It also supports Apache Hadoop and SAP HANA platform, enabling high-performance analytics on petabyte-scale data.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software offers users a simple experience for gaining immediate, interactive access to data to create visualisations and answer business questions on the fly.
The upgrade also enables integration between SAP StreamWork application and BI documents, improving social collaboration by bringing together people, information and business methods for fast, meaningful results.
Feature pack 3 also enables SAP application integration that enables customers to run operational reporting off of the SAP ERP application and multi-source universes.
SAP Visual Intelligence is a desktop BI application that works with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and has read and write integration with SAP HANA.
Release 1.0.1 of SAP Visual Intelligence will allow people use personal data sources such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and CSV files, in addition to data from SAP HANA. It also features SAP StreamWork connectivity for collaborative BI.
SAP is also planning to organise its analytics and BI strategy around five "pillars," spanning from essential platform technology to social collaboration.
Data exploration, visualisation, reporting, sharing and more are essential for organisations to understand how they are performing.
The second pillar is that easy-to-use and self-service connectivity to BI tools help users gain deeper insights into data.
Third pillar is that delivering business analytics to workers on any device at any location is becoming more important, while the fourth include capabilities such as real-time and predictive analytics that enable organisations to tackle "big data," uncover hidden risks and reveal untapped opportunities.
Fifth is increased collaboration that allow teams to drive and capture the decision-making processes surrounding structured and unstructured data.