SAP to increase focus on business intelligence
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SAP plans to expand its focus on business intelligence (BI) software over the next year.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, may need an extra year to achieve its medium-term profit target of an operating margin of 30 percent, its chief financial officer said.
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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If you're wondering just how big SAP is becoming, IDC's Albert Pang has this nugget for you: "The recent rise of SAP as the leading enterprise applications vendor across multiple customer and product categories has created a booming economy whereby an increasing number of developers and resellers are jockeying for the attention of the market leader and its installed base of more than 41,000 customers," he wrote in a recent IDC report.
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SAP, a leading maker of business software, says a strong performance of its European activities helped boost earnings in the third quarter, which came out above analysts' expectations.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, said a strong performance of its European activities helped boost earnings in the third quarter, which came out higher than analysts' expectations.
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San Francisco, December 7: Oracle Corp on Monday said it believes its business software applications, an area that has lagged the rest of the company, are gaining ground against market leader SAP AG of Germany.
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SAP AG  on Wednesday  introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management  software for mid-sized companies, which is at the heart of a  strategy to accelerate the company's sales and compete in the  Internet software arena where smaller rivals are ahead.
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Boosted by strong sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and with continued growth in the U.S., SAP AG, the world's largest maker of business management software, posted a third-quarter rise in revenue and net income.
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(InfoWorld) - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries. SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday. The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for. Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.
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SAP is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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The world's leading provider of business software, SAP, said Wednesday it expected sustained growth this year following a 3.0-percent rise in net profit in 2007.
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) is expanding business intelligence capabilities in its database software with two free software service packs that augment the reporting capabilities in SQL Server 2000.
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JasperSoft&#39;s next upgrade of its open-source business intelligence suite, due out Nov. 1, will improve the ability for users to create their own customized reports.
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(InfoWorld) - Two of three companies aim to grow faster than their markets this year, making it more important than ever for chief information officers to shift their priorities to encompass business objectives, according to a survey from Gartner. CIOs who do that will differentiate themselves, and their enterprise IT departments, and be leaders in an emerging trend where they and their employees have more business skills and acumen, said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. Gartner has surveyed CIOs for the annual study since 2002. More than 1,400 CIOs were queried worldwide. Gartner has identified four strategies that CIOs should pursue: technical excellence; enterprise agility; information effectiveness; and innovation. The third strategy involves using analytics and applying information to how business decisions are made, rather than how information is moved around a company's computer systems. Companies that "look at [information] as a resource as opposed to an asset to be managed had significantly better performance," McDonald said. Interestingly, the survey found that 86 percent of respondents identify innovation as critical to success, but only 26 percent said that innovation processes are sufficient to achieve goals. Although a corporate environment or culture that does not encourage innovation was flagged as the number-one roadblock, the survey found that among those who said that innovation processes are sufficient, corporate culture wasn't mentioned. Rather, those companies approach innovation as a "structured process" that generates results. Those enterprises also have "technology effectiveness," with IT departments that operate at "a service level" but keep costs under control. As for budgets, the survey found that IT departments on average will have more money for the fourth year in a row, but just 3 percent more on average and 3.4 percent among U.S. companies whose CIOs were surveyed. That's not much and points to the need to "do more with what you've got" as opposed to doing more with less, McDonald said. Along those lines, successful CIOs understand that "business knowledge has to become the highest common denominator across the IT shop." That presents a challenge for some companies where the IT department focus is more on technical expertise. "My coder should know how my company makes money regardless of the work they do," McDonald said. Ensuring that means that "you have to change the source of new recruits." More than 70 percent of CIOs anticipate they will hire new employees from IT shops at other companies rather than "tapping into the reservoir of talent within their own businesses." Recruiting from other IT departments means you wind up with "more of the same rather than someone who is different," he said. CIOs also need to focus on training for employees they already have, to help them develop heightened business acumen. That could include something as simple and inexpensive as brown-bag lunch sessions, McDonald said. Overall, Gartner finds that CIOs need to focus on "the next big round number" and develop a vision for 2010. The last such focus was in 2000 when "everybody was kind of willing to celebrate, but they were celebrating and laying out grand strategies with an eye over their shoulders because they weren't sure if their systems were going to collapse," he said. CIOs who don't look to 2010 and communicate a vision for their departments will find that others do that for them, McDonald said.
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Business Objects, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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German business software vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.