SAP the New BI Player

This week I had the pleasure of attending the SAP User Group (SAUG) and Duet launch in Sydney Australia. I was actually at the SAUG to co-present with Microsoft on the capabilities of Microsoft’s BI technologies on top of SAP & SAP BW. I learned a very valuable lesson this week….There is a bug with Microsoft’s Virtual PC software. If you plug a monitor / overhead projector into your laptop after you have booted up your VPC image then it will disable your keyboard within your VPC image. So 30 minutes into your presentation when you switch from PPT to the VPC and have to log back into the VPC image you are locked out as your key board doesn’t work. Doh!!

What was stated and demonstrated to the SAP user community is that SAP Netweaver BI 2004s is not just for SAP data. The message was loud and clear that if you want to integrate non-SAP data into Netweaver BI 2004s it is easy and the best way to go for a SAP customer. At the same time they did not present it in the light of being compared to Microsoft’s BI technologies.

SAP has an application call xApp Analytics. In short this is your Reporting services / Crystal reports type application. No wonder they ended their relationship with BO. They have also partnered with Macromedia to provide some animated style graphing. No per say business value delivered by this but it allows for graphs to be updated or transitioned into frame in a similar fashion as to what you experience in PowerPoint when an object transitions in by “flying in” from the bottom of the slide. A bit of demo sexiness. It does allow for the graphs to be interactive though, so I take my comment back of no business value. But don’t be mistaken the tool looks good, works with multiple data sources and has a nice designer tool with objects in task panes on the right and design processes similar to a Visio or SSIS experience. You will also see a lot of xApp Analytics in Duet or something similar. I was surprised to see SAP taking the lead on reporting in Duet, but maybe because they owned the data so they got the reporting. This is probably a good idea for a Duet plug in service where all the reporting is done in SSRS.

Then you have the Business Information Warehouse (BW) with a wide reach beyond just SAP and believe me this point was stressed. The issue with this from a delivery stand point is most of SAP BW services consultants / partners don’t have strong data warehouse architecture skills because they are too use to that knowledge being embedded in the SAP BW Info Providers. If you are competing against a SAP solution offering (I am) then I would probably try to stress the experience of your organization ability in being able to deliver the solution verses the technologies capabilities.

They also have the BI Accelerator for high performance analytics (i.e. hardware and extra license fees) to make your large queries respond quickly. Not a one running in Australia yet. My perception is that this is a mistake in product marketing for SAP. It makes it sound like if you have lot of data, you're going have performance problems so you need to invest in additional hardware and we are going charge you an additional license because the one you already bought doesn’t do the job. SAP needs to rethink this.

Downside of the Netweaver BI 2004s suite though is that it requires the SAP portal to run a lot of it (i.e. designer tool and other components). The good thing for SAP customers who license the SAP ERP application moving forward though is that Netweaver BI and Portal are included with the licenses (small disclaimer, I do not know the ins and outs of Microsoft licensing let alone SAP licensing). So if you are a SAP customer on the 2004s/R3 stack running on SQL Server 2005 you will own two powerful BI platforms.

What you did not hear at the conference, but you have to belive is coming is positioning SAP BI 2004s or later versions as a BI platform independent of the SAP core systems (i.e. SCM, ERP, CRM) But I guess they have a big enough market to go after with their current and new SAP customers before worring about those companies not running SAP.

I hear the foot steps coming from those 2nd generation (IDC 3rd generation) BI players marching forward.

IDC BI Report

Many of you have probably seen this IDC report already, but in case you haven't take a look.

A few things that I take away from it:
1. They talk about the 3rd wave of BI starting in the 2005 stand point. This is similar thought as previous post. I fully agree with this point and this is a good one to bring up when talking to customers / prospects to make them feel good about the long term prospect of the decision they are making or to make them feel bad if they are making the wrong decision.
2. Take not of growth percentages. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are the ones that jump out at me. These are the 2nd generation / 3rd wave players.
3. Business Objects sits at the top and have natural market momentum, but they are not growing as fast as they should. Ending their relationship with SAP will hurt.
4. Combine ProClarity's growth with Microsoft's and you have a powerful force in the market taking marketing share.

SAP Kills Reseller, OEM Alliance With Business Objects

Ok, I know I have not posted for a long time. This is true, but I have a good excuse. Three weeks of vacation (e.g. Hawaii, Denver and Indiana), A week in Boston for the Microsoft partner conference, and then a couple weeks of trying to get caught back up on the work load that piled up during that time. I am back now though and plan to continue providing content around selling and positioning against other BI solutions.

A while back ago I did a post on 1st generation BI providers versus second generation BI providers. It talked about those that are 1st generation BI providers that are trying to make it into the second generation providers and those players like Microsoft who just started in the second generation. Well from my perspective it seems like Business Objects might be one of the first casualties of 1st generation BI providers who do not make it into the second generation. When you have partnerships like SAP being severed that can't be good for your business. Take a look at what it did to its stock price on July 9th when the announcement came out. In their last quarterly report they announced that they had 14 deals >$1 million. I wonder how many of them were SAP customers?

Now there are still a lot of positive things being said about Business Objects in the market, but any 1st generation provider is going have a ride down the right hand side of the bell curve after hitting their peak. It takes time to make that journey down.

Should give any customer who is considering Business Objects enough uncertainty in their way of thinking to consider another option that is on the left hand side of the bell curve and riding the wave upward. Oh by the way, just because an organisation is experiencing growth does not mean that they are growing marketing share. I mean really....who would have a tough time growing BI revenue in the current market?

Oh yah, I also found out from a prospect/customer upon returning from vacation that while I was on vacation they made the decision to go with the Microsoft BI solution over the Business Objects solution moving forward even though they had already been using Crystal Reports for years. A nice way to return from holidays.

BOs Universe vs SSAS cube

I have been meaning to drill down on an earlier post where I refer to Symmetry Corporations white paper comparing the history of BO BI vs MS BI. Well thanks to Stephane R. Langer's post Cubes & universes there is less for me to do now. Stephane does a great job of discussion Business Objects universes compared to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services cubes. There are some good points in here that you can pull out when competing against BO next time.

Thanks Stephane!

When time permits I will go back through my notes and put down more thoughts that I have on the matter.

Oracle's BI Suite

Mark Rittman does a nice post post reviewing Oracle's current BI offering and suite. It's always good to know what you are competing against! It includes some screen shots and details of the architecture.

From a position stand point there are some obvious area of catch-up to SQL 2005 and some additional areas of work to integrate products.

Overall, Oracle is probably on the right track, but they have work ahead of them. It appears that they are still trying to play catch-up to Microsoft in several areas.

Last note, won't it be nice when Office 2007 & Microsoft/ProClarity is out and we have nice graphics to include in our solutions without having to leaverage 3rd party applications?

Why are organizations moving to Microsoft's BI platform?

The other day I was asked "Why are organizations moving to Microsoft's BI platform? Is there a white paper or something that outlines the reasons?" Well instead of writing a white paper I thought I would answer that question here. This is a tough question to answer or position, but if answered well will win MS and you a lot of business and take a lot away from the competition.

Why would you migrate from your existing investment in another BI technology?
1. Lower TCO: This is derived by lower license fees, less vendor management (e.g. managing multiple vendors), less end user training, less system administration, etc. Obviously, there would be a shorter term cost, but hopefully a longer term savings.
2. Better utilization of BI budget: I been working with some organisation that would rather be paying consulting organizations or internal staff for their efforts to help develop content for their BI solution instead of spending that money on maintenance fees for high priced software that they are not fully utilising. This is assuming they have installed all the modules they are paying for which 90% is not the case.
3. END USER ACCEPTANCE OF THE SOLUTION: Let's not forget that this is the whole reason why we do it. Do what makes the end user happy and is easiest for them? Think from the point of view of existing employees and future employees. How much turn over does the organisation have. This then can become significant.
4. The number of Microsoft BI partners: There are a lot of partners out there so you are not tied into a particular organization. If your service provider is not serving you well you can choose someone else to work with. When working directly with the BI vendor you don't always have this luxury.
5. Available resources: There are a lot of Microsoft SQL and BI resources out there in the world(e.g. books, training courses, PEOPLE). Not to mention #4 above. Have you ever tried to hire a Microstrategy or Hummingbird resource in Australia compared to someone with Microsoft skills?
6. Because you own 2 BI solutions: There are a lot of customers that have been using SQL Server for years and haven't realised the BI benefits that have come along the way, so they have used another BI tool on top of their SQL Server system. Now they are starting to migrate to SQL and phase out the old BI solution or at least they are starting to do some side by side implementations and evaluations to make sure they are using the best BI solution.
7. Future direction of the solution. Microsoft has a big investment in their BI tools moving forward beyond where they are at today.
8. Because the organisation is implementing an intranet site, work flow solution or some other solution that starts to make you think "why am I not also using Microsoft's BI solution." For instance if you are looking at implementing SharePoint for your intranet site then it makes you start to look at what information will enhance your intranet solution. What Microsoft BI tools can I utilise?

I am sure there are many more to consider, but that's a list to get ya started.

Selling Office 2007 / MOSS

Tim Wragg's blog has a good post on Top 5 things Businesses will want with SharePoint 2007.

On a side note, SharePoint is one the best selling points of Microsoft's BI platform as well, as it provides customers with something that the other BI providers don't deliver with their solution. This is a very strong selling point that should be utilised.