Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

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