Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

BOBJ Polestar and SAP BIA

At Sapphire, in the keynotes, there was a lot of discussion of the new Business Objects Application called Polestar.  Polestar was demoed against SAP’s Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA).  The keynote demo showed Polestar working against over a billion records in BIA and performing extremely well.

I went onto the show floor to get a closer look.  At the BOBJ pod, I met Nigel Stoodley from BOBJ who gave me a very good demo.  Even though the demo on the show floor was not Polestar against BIA, it was nonetheless very impressive.  Polestar allows you to do ad hoc analysis of your data.  The current Polestar product has a Google like interface to start with where you enter your query.  It then goes against the Universe and finds potential matches for your query.  You select a match and then a very nice graphical user interface comes up showing details of your selection.  You can drill down in the data, you can compare data, and you can get different types of visualizations – bar charts, pie charts, etc.  It is a simple yet powerful GUI that allows for a non analyst user to navigate the data and get a better understanding.  Very nice product and worth trying out if you want something like this.

I asked Nigel more about how Polestar goes against various data.  Nigel explained to me that Polestar is built to go against a Universe.  Therefore, any BOBJ customer that has a Universe or multiple Universes, can get Polestar and immediately be able to use the product.  I then queried further to understand how Polestar worked with BIA.  Nigel explained that SAP/BOBJ built a Universe on top of the BIA.  Data was loaded into the BIA and the Universe allowed Polestar to access this data.  While Polestar is a shipping product, the ability to connect to BIA is not readily available.  Let’s hope SAP brings this out soon.  In the keynote, my understanding is that they demoed the Polestar – BIA solution live and were connecting to a BIA server that was in Walldorf, Germany.  Apparently, they were connecting live all the way from Orlando to Walldorf.  What was not explained was what the hardware configuration of the BIA system was that was able to process over a billion records so fast.

I really enjoyed Hasso’s keynote this year.  I thought he did a really good job.  Hasso is a good speaker and he had the audience engaged, interested, and amused.  I really cracked up when he swore on stage.  Hasso seems to be a strong proponent of TREX and BIA.

SAP Sapphire - Patrick Lencioni

The first official day of Sapphire was very busy.  They main keynotes were Patrick Lencioni and Tom Brokaw.  I have to admit that other than the keynotes, I only attended 1 session (lots of networking and not enough time in the day).

The session that I attended was by Doug Merritt and Marge Breya.  Doug owns what is now called POA - performance optimization applications and Marge owns the IDD (Information Discovery and Delivery) piece from BOBJ.  This was a good session to attend after attending the session by Dan Kearnan et al yesterday.  Doug and Marge gave an overview of the general direction of the combined SAP and BOBJ in the BI space.  They have this new application called Polestar.  Very interesting UI and they demo Polestar sitting on top of BIA.  Quite slick.  I want to go find this on the show floor and actually play with it myself.  Will write more when I get the chance.

I also want to mention the keynote by Patrick Lencioni.  I have read his first two books (they were very good) and then didn't read any of his other material.  The session today reminded me that I should read his newer material.  Patrick spoke about "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team".  Patrick is a really good speaker and I quite enjoyed his talk.  If you get a chance to see him speak, do it.  After the keynote, I purchased the book and got it autographed.  I spent a few minutes talking to Patrick.  Very interesting person.  A summary of the five dysfunctions are:

1. Absence of Trust

2. Fear of Conflict

3. Lack of Commitment

4. Avoidance of Accountability

5. Inattention to Results

I especially like #2.  You can't just accept a non-committal yes.  You really need to get people to discuss and debate the issue so that you get their real input.  Now that I have the book, I have some good reading material for the flight back home on Wednesday.

SAP Sapphire - SAP and Business Objects

I am at Sapphire 2008 this week and yesterday I attended the Jumpstart session entitled "SAP and Business Objects: Understanding the new Business Intelligence Platform in Detail".  I think the attendance was more than they expected because the room was very full and they ran out of lunch boxes.  Having said that, it was a very good session and it was a positive that the attendance was high.  In the past, SAP and BOBJ have published their joint product roadmap but the session yesterday made many things clearer.  The main presenters were Dan Kearnan, Tanner Spalding, and Bobby Coates.  They also had Bryan Katis come in for about 45 minutes to talk about their Performance Management Roadmap - what they are now calling Performance Optimization Applications.

If you are at Sapphire, Dan will have a session today (Monday) at 3:45 that will give an overview of the Jumpstart session yesterday.

Dan gave a nice overview of the roadmap. A few things that I found interesting are that SAP customers will get a stripped down version of Cyrstal Reports called Crystal Light as part of the base SAP offering.  SAP and BOBJ are still trying to figure out what will be in Crystal Light and were quite open to hearing feedback from customers which is very good.  Of course, the customers that were in the room were all encouraging SAP to put as much into Crystal Light as possible because this will be a base offering and will not cost customers extra.

On the Performance Management front, it looks like the go forward platforms are the ones from Outlooksoft, Pilot and ALG.  While the offerings from INEA, Cartesis, and SRC are still supported, eventually the customers and any special functionality will migrate to the go forward platforms.  Of course, there is no overlap with SAP's GRC product so it too will continue forward.  Performance Management is any area of heavy overlap between SAP and BOBJ and this rationalization was expected.

On the BIA front, one thing I found interesting was SAP BOBJ is considering how to use BIA to enhance performance of BOBJ Universes.  There has been a lot of talk about a standalone BIA.  I had assumed that this meant a BIA that was database like.  Using BIA to enhance the performance of BOBJ Universes is a great idea and would indicate BIA is more of a database accelerator that plugs into any data source.  Interesting idea.  I am hoping to attend more sessions on BIA this week and hopefully learn more.

SAP's BI Chief Juggles Independence, Integration

InfoWorld has published a very interesting interview with John Schwarz, the former CEO of Business Objects who now heads the SAP Business Objects division. Definitely worth a read http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/02/SAPs-BI-chief-juggles-independence-integration_1.html. I have always been a fan of the data warehouse appliance and John speaks a bit about SAP’s BIA “We are also borrowing technology [from SAP] called Business Intelligence Accelerator, or BI Accelerator, an in-memory data management tool that was built by SAP primarily to improve the performance of access to massive data structures inside BW. We have attached to BI Accelerator our query and our search capability, we will probably also attach our OLAP client, so we'll be able to do queries or search or slicing-and-dicing of the in-memory data cube with lightning speed. Ultimately, I'd like to use the technology outside of the SAP BW context as well, so we'll have the ability to do in-memory analytics everywhere, so that's a very exciting development on the BI side.”

The future of SAP’s BIA is definitely something to watch. From past experience, the independent Business Objects was a big fan of the data warehouse appliance. At last year’s Sapphire, Business Objects was demonstrating a Netezza data warehouse appliance in their booth. At last fall’s Business Objects Conference in Orlando, Netezza had a big presence and you even had the Chief Transformation Officer from Business Objects speaking at a session that featured Netezza. Business Objects is definitely keen on the data warehouse appliance space. SAP has been strongly promoting their BIA – I have been to a number of sessions in the past at Sapphire and at the SAP BI and Portals conference where lots of good things have been said about BIA.

From John Schwarz’s comments, he is suggesting he would “like to use the technology outside of the SAP BW context as well”. This to me is a very interesting comment. In the SAP context, the BIA is an add-on to the SAP BW product, which can significantly boost performance. The question is, what will BIA look like outside of the SAP BW context? SAP is a huge and powerful organization, but one thing they currently lack is a strong database product. Their main competitors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – have major database products and HP is investing heavily in NeoView. Will BIA outside of the SAP context be a new and powerful database? SAP currently generates a lot of revenue for companies like Oracle whose database is used in a lot of SAP deployments. It makes sense that this is something that SAP wants to change.

John Schwarz also talks about integration into the SAP stack and also having independent BI applications. This is also another area to watch.

Whither Essbase?

I always enjoyed the Hyperion Solutions Conference. One of the things I enjoyed at Solutions was R&D Central. This was an opportunity to meet the Hyperion engineers and see what they were working on. After Oracle acquired Hyperion, I was wondering what they would do to replace Solutions. I attended Oracle OpenWorld in November, but this was such a huge conference it was hard to really see much. The upcoming ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 Conference looks to have some interesting sessions on the Hyperion Products and especially Essbase. (http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html) Essbase is a strong product, backed by a strong engineering team. The Hyperion Essbase track at the Kaleidoscope Conference looks very good. There are keynotes from people like Robert Gersten and John Kopcke, where they will talk about the Future of Essbase and Where Essbase Fits within Oracle respectively. Sessions on the Aggregate Storage Options (ASO) and MDX also look good. I keep prodding the folks at Microsoft and Hyperion/Oracle about the XMLA Council. When Bill Baker at Microsoft and Robert Gersten at Oracle made the effort to work together on XMLA and MDX as an open standard, that was a huge step forward. It would be a shame if the new Hyperion/Oracle and Microsoft did not continue that effort. From the agenda of the Kaleidoscope Conference, MDX is mentioned, so it looks like Hyperion/Oracle is still supporting the MDX Language. I am curious to know what more Hyperion/Oracle plans...

Nine Business Intelligence Vendors to Watch

Thomas Wailgum takes "a look at the leading BI vendors' strengths, weaknesses and strategies for the future” in his article at: http://www.cio.com/article/203900/Nine_Business_Intelligence_Vendors_to_Watch/. If you don’t have access to the 2008 Gartner BI Magic Quadrant, Wailgum’s article is worth a quick read. Interesting how HP could join the ranks of the top four BI megavendors. Of course, such a move by HP would require a major acquisition. Also interesting how Wailgum says that "With its prized Business Objects purchase under its umbrella, SAP is now the largest BI platform vendor, almost twice the size of its next largest competitor, according to Gartner.” This comment reminds me of the Business Application space where SAP was (is?) bigger than Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards combined. Of course, I am still curious about Google and Panorama. Remember that Panorama and ProClarity competed to be the best BI product on top of Microsoft Analysis Services. Then, after Microsoft bought ProClarity, Panorama embraced SAP, and now Panorama seems to be flirting with Google. What would happen if Google took BI seriously and made a big push into the Enterprise market

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 BI

A few people have asked me about what’s coming up in the next version of Microsoft SQL Server.  I asked Brian Welcker about this (Brian used to be the GPM of SQL Server Reporting Services).  Brian suggested the following website http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/.  Reporting Services is covered at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx and Analysis Services is covered at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/analysis-services.aspx.

Microsoft is also having a number of Launch Events for SQL Server 2008 http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx.  Looks promotional but may be worth attending, if there is one in a city near you.

Pivot Tables in Google Spreadsheets?

I was reading about this in eWeek (http://www.midmarket.eweek.com/c/a/News/Google-Offering-Free-BI-for-Spreadsheets/).  This sounds interesting.  I have not used Google Spreadsheets.  Having not tried it out, I thought I'd mention it to see if anyone has tried this and has any comments?

Pig in the Python

I was reading a recent article by Lou Agosta in DM Review http://www.dmreview.com/issues/2007_45/10000893-1.html and he suggests that “Conventional wisdom suggests this will be a year for digestion - neither the year of the snake nor the pig, rather the year of the pig in the python.” Very good analogy. He also talks about the data warehouse appliance. I personally like the idea of the data warehouse appliance and tend to agree with Lou.

The OLAP Report

I had an opportunity to dive into the latest OLAP Report this weekend. In the latest publication, Nigel Pendse talks a lot about the consolidation in the BI space (http://www.olapreport.com/consolidations.htm) and he has an interesting chart that shows all the acquisitions in the space. His use of colours on this chart is especially interesting because you see how much consolidation there has been in recent years, as opposed to just acquisitions. In my blog on January 15th, I wrote about the consolidations in the BI space and Nigel’s chart visually highlights just how much consolidation did happen.