Connect – a Simba Technologies Blog

TBIO - ROLAP on Teradata - smarter, faster, easier

Teradata recently launched their TBIO (Teradata Business Intelligence Optimizer) product.  Martin Willcox from Teradata has a little YouTube video in which he describes a bit more about the TBIO product.  You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-qVYRxwM0.  Basically, the Teradata Business Intelligence Optimizer has 3 components:

1. Teradata Schema Workbench

2. Teradata Aggregate Designer

3. Teradata OLAP Connector

Schema Workbench lets you define your OLAP schema within your Teradata database.  Aggregate Designer lets you build the aggregate join indexes so that queries on your OLAP schema run fast.  OLAP connector allows Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables to connect to your Teradata database using the MDX Query Language so you can do ad-hoc query and analysis on your data.  No data movement is required.  Everything is done within your Teradata database.

Teradata OLAP Connector - MDX Query Language access to Teradata Database

A little over a week ago, I wrote about how Teradata is now supporting direct connectivity from Excel Pivot Tables via the MDX Query Language.  The Teradata product is called Teradata OLAP Connector.  Here is a link to Teradata's brochure for the Teradata OLAP Connector: http://www.teradata.com/t/brochures/Teradata-OLAP-Connector-eb6212/?type=BR.  Teradata is touting the following as advantages to this product:

- real-time data

- reduced IT workload

- continued security

- workload management

- consistent results

- competitive advantage

The reality is that in the past, Teradata has not really supported OLAP.  You needed to have a mid-tier server that sat between the Teradata database and your BI application.  Now, you just build your cubes within Teradata and so there is no mid-tier and no data movement.  Your BI application gets direct access to the power of your Teradata implementation.  Of course, at this time, Teradata OLAP Connector is only supporting Excel Pivot Tables.  However, since this is an MDX query language solution, well, you do the math...

Teradata supports MDX query language

Well, it is now official, Teradata has launched their Teradata OLAP Connector product which allows Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables to connect to a Teradata database.  Basically, you can define a virtual OLAP cube on top of your existing tables within a Teradata database and then use Excel Pivot Tables to do ad-hoc query and analysis on your data.  Excel connects to the Teradata Database using the MDX Query Language.  The really nice part of this solution is that all your data stays in Teradata and you get more options on how to analyze the data.  You get the full power of Excel Pivot Tables and you get the full analytics power of the Teradata database.  Teradata now supports both the SQL and MDX query languages!  You can read more here:

http://www.teradata.com/t/News-Releases/2010/Teradata-OLAP-Connector-Enriches-Direct-Excel-Connectivity-Enhancing-Enterprise-and-Real-time-Analytics/

http://www.simba.com/news/Simba-Builds-Custom-ROLAP-BI-Solution-for-Teradata.htm

http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!7726.entry

EMC buys GreenPlum

Interesting news yesterday about EMC's acquisition of data warehouse appliance company GreenPlum.  GreenPlum had of course partnered heavily with Sun Microsystems which was recently acquired by database giant Oracle.  GreenPlum has some interesting customers including eBay, NYSE Euronext, and NASDAQ OMX Group.  GreenPlum plays in the same space as veterans Teradata and Oracle and upcomers like Aster Data, Kognitio, ParAccel, InfoBright, Vertica, etc.  This is a very interesting space which saw Microsoft acquire DataAllegro and coming out with SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Edition as well as SAP's pending acquisition of Sybase.  SAP is also working on their own in-memory column-oriented technology and their upcoming HANA appliance.  As the volume of data continues to grow exponentially, the ability to store and analyze large amounts of data continues to be a challenge for every enterprise and so we will continue to see more action in this space.  As the databases scale to be larger and larger, one question that always comes up is how do we access and analyze all of this data.  The SQL query language accessed via ODBC and JDBC drivers continues to be the language of choice in the database world.  The MDX query language accessed via ODBO and XMLA is now the de-facto language of choice for analytics.

I was recently asked who supports MDX and the answer is, everyone.  The major database players - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP all support MDX query language.  The major BI players - SAP/Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle/Hyperion, and IBM/Cognos all support the MDX language.  Microsoft Excel is on virtually every desktop in the enterprise and if you look at Microsoft's recently released Excel 2010, the BI capabilities in Pivot Tables has been extended with the addition of sparklines, slicers, and even write-back.  Excel Pivot Tables talks to analytic databases using the MDX query language.  SQL and MDX are both necessary for analytics today.

SAP acquires Sybase - BI Implications

Boris Evelson had an interesting blog entry about the "BI Implications Of SAP-Sybase Deal".  You can read the blog here: http://www.information-management.com/blogs/business_intelligence_sybase_sap-10017853-1.html.  From my point of view, it is interesting that Boris is pondering about an MDX query language interface for Sybase IQ.  Simba has partnered with SAP to do this for BW and we have partnered with Oracle to do this for OLAP Option.  Simba has also developed a ROLAP technology that allows us to build cube schemas and an appropriate MDX query language interface on top of relational (SQL) data sources.  We haven't tried to do this on Sybase IQ, but it might be interesting.

Oracle Data Warehouse Strategic Update

At the Oracle Collaborate conference last week, I attended a session presented by Ray Roccaforte who is an SVP at Oracle.  The BIWA (Business Intelligence data Warehousing and Analytics) SIG was Ray's idea/initiative.  Ray talked about the Sun Oracle Database Machine, Oracle In-Database Analytics, and Industry-Analytics Solution Sets.  This was a good session and one major point Ray made was that Oracle was bringing the Analytics to the Data rather than the Data to the Analytics.

Ray talked about the Database Machine and some key points were:

- complete data warehouse solution - hardware and software

- extreme scalability and performance

- short time to value

- hybrid columnar compression

- fast hardware

- big pipe

For In-Database Analytics, some key points were:

- bring the algorithms to the data

- Oracle OLAP for multi-dimensional queries and the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP which provides an open, dimensional interface.  Oracle OLAP is also a summary management solution for SQL based BI applications.  Oracle OLAP is embedded in the Oracle Database instance and storage so it automatically gets the full benefit of the database machine flash cache.

- Data Mining includes a wide range of traditional and cutting edge algorithms developed inside the SQL kernel and Exadata Smart Scan where model scoring is performed in the Exadata Storage Server

Ray's talk was very insightful and another interesting comment he made is that Oracle is positioning to be a solution provider instead of just a component provider.

Russ Tront and I also had a presentation where we talked about the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP.  If anyone wants the slides from that talk, please feel free to email me.  Russ and Mike van der Velden also did a hands on lab where they had people walk though analyzing their Oracle OLAP cubes using the MDX Provider and Microsoft Excel 2007.  The participants found this session very valuable.  If anyone is interested in a demo of the Oracle OLAP MDX Provider or wants to get a copy of it to try out, again, please feel free to email me.

The Kingdom of Excel

Whoa!  At the Gartner BI Summit, they suggested we "Wave the white flag on using Excel for business intelligence".  What breakthrough thinking!  This is something we at Simba have seen for years.  Many BI/OLAP vendors have come to us looking for an MDX Query Language solution for their OLAP/data warehousing products. We have found that a key driver for supporting the MDX Query Language was connectivity with Excel and specifically Excel Pivot Tables.  Microsoft continues to invest heavily in the BI capabilities of Excel and having an MDX Provider for your OLAP/multi-dimensional data source allows Excel to connect natively.  Native Excel connectivity is something we have now brought to Oracle OLAP cubes and we will even be at the Oracle Collaborate 10 conference next week where we have two sessions on showing users how to use Excel to connect to Oracle 11g database: http://www.simba.com/news/Simba-Provides-Free-Training-Connecting-Excel-PivotTables-to-Oracle-OLAP-at-COLLABORATE.htm.

Excel connectivity is a very important feature of any data source be it relational, multi-dimensional, ISAM, object-oriented, XML, etc.  Excel can connect to anything that has an ODBC or an ODBO interface.  Once someone can see how their data can be pulled live into Excel and how an Excel user can then get creative in their tool of choice, it becomes a very powerful reason to have an ODBC driver or ODBO provider.

You can read more about what Gartner is saying here: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/2240018042/Gartner-BI-Summit-Wave-the-white-flag-on-using-Excel-for-business-intelligence.

Tutorial on using Excel Pivot Tables with Oracle OLAP Option

There are a lot of people who currently use the Excel Spreadsheet Add-in for Oracle OLAP 10g cubes. Moving to Oracle OLAP 11g cubes, the spreadsheet add-in has been replaced by the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. If you need to learn how to use the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP with Excel spreadsheets, Oracle has now come up with a nice tutorial that covers "how to use Excel 2007 with Oracle11g OLAP data for easy and powerful ad hoc query and analysis": http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr2_db_prod/bidw/olap11g_excel/olap_excel.htm#s8.

Oracle OLAP Newsletter - January 2010

I just got the Oracle OLAP Newsletter for January 2010 and we got a nice write-up on Simba's MDX solution for Oracle OLAP 11g.  The University of Applied Sciences in Wildau, Germany has a Masters course in Data Warehousing.  They use Oracle OLAP in this course and the students used Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP in their course work. They were able to connect from Excel spreadsheets to their OLAP cubes.  You can read more about it on the Oracle website: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/olapref/newsletter/oracleolapnewsletter_jan10.html.

Oracle Exadata

Over the last year, we have been doing a fair bit of work with Oracle 11g OLAP Option and the MDX query language.  Although I have not had access to an Exadata machine for testing, people tell me that OLAP runs very well on the database machine and our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP allows Excel to connect to OLAP on the database machine.  In doing more research on the database machine, I re-read an article by Stephen Swoyer from October this year that I thought might be of interest to others who are curious about the Data Warehousing space and Exadata in particular.  You can find the article at: http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9628.  Worth a quick read.  I expect that there will be more Exadata reference customers in 2010.

Happy New Year to everyone and wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010.

Also, if anyone is interested, Vancouver and Whistler will be hosting the Winter Olympics from February 12 to 28, 2010.  It will be quite an event.  If you want more information, please visit http://www.vancouver2010.com.  If you are planning on visiting, please give me a heads up.

XMLA for Oracle OLAP 11g

Now that our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP 11g is released, the team has been working on the next version. The released product supports the MDX query language and the ODBO COM interface.  We now have a proof of concept of an XMLA provider in house.  If anyone is interested in trying this out, give me a shout and we can discuss.

Cool title... "Peace in Our OLAP Time"

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge wrote a nice piece about what Simba has done for Oracle OLAP by adding MDX query language support and I thought I would mention it here: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/peace-our-olap-time.  Mike is quite right when he says "For an IT organization, the alliance between Oracle and Simba creates a way to develop an OLAP application using MDX without ultimately having to worry about whether the OLAP engine of one of the major database vendors in the market will support that application."

With version 1 of our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP, we have really promoted Microsoft Excel as a BI/analytics client for Oracle OLAP cubes.  Ultimately, we intend to provide a solid MDX query language interface to Oracle OLAP so that any MDX compliant front end can connect to Oracle OLAP cubes.  There is a lot of data stored in Oracle and we want to open that up to dimensional analysis.  Think about all the creative people in an organization who could do so much more if they just had access to the data for analysis purposes.  Our solution frees the data for analysis.  That it really cool!

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 and MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was quite busy for me.  We jointly with Oracle launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and there was great interest.  I will write more about that later.

Larry Ellison's keynote was interesting as always.  This year, his major rant was against IBM.  Larry is offering a $10,000,000 reward to anyone that can make a Oracle database run at least half as fast on an IBM computer as it does on Sun's fastest computer.  Larry did also show off the Fusion apps which looked very nice.  These are expected to be available in early 2010.

We launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP on Monday, October 12th. We put out a joint press release with Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/036550.  We also had a session at the end of the day to show off the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and Excel connecting to Oracle OLAP. It was a fun session to do because people were quite excited to see what we had.  Attendance was quite good - we had over 70 people - considering we were at the end of the day and competing with the OTN party.  In the session, people found it interesting that we were not using a spreadsheet add-in because that is how everyone else connects to Excel.  People were quite impressed with the BI and charting features of Excel as well as how easily you could pull PivotCharts into PowerPoint and have them dynamically update.

We also demoed the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP at the Oracle DEMOgrounds.  Thanks to Bud Endress, Marty Gubar, and Jameson White who did a great job showing everyone what you can now do with Excel and OLAP Option. We were demoing in 2 pods and we had good traffic all throughout the show.  One person who came by explained that up till now, their users pull the data from OLAP into Microsoft Access and from there into Excel.  This, of course, loses all the dimensional characteristics of the data but it shows you how much people want to get data into Excel.  I also had people asking me if this works with other dimensionally aware BI products and the answer is "we are working on that".  In fact, we are making good progress on that front.  We even demoed SAP BusinessObjects Voyager to an Oracle OLAP customer this summer even before we had released version 1 of the product.  The SAP guys involved couldn't believe how easily we connected to Oracle OLAP.

Now I can finally say that the MDX Query Language is a widely used standard that is supported by every major OLAP cube product!

SAP Improves Universe-Based Access To BW via MDX

According to a blog posting by Thomas Zurek at SAP (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/13566%3Fpage%3Dlast%26x-maxdepth%3D0), accessing BW via OLAP Universes "has now been optimized and streamlined in order to improve the interoperability."  It sounds like SAP has extended the OLAP Data Access (ODA) component so that it is more tailored to what OLAP Universes require.  Thomas also presents some statistics that show "on average, the runtime has gone down by 30% while memory consumption has been reduced by over 50% with the used set of WebI queries."  Yet another sign that SAP is working to better integrate Business Objects applications with their NetWeaver BW data warehouse.

MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

The team at Simba has been very busy working on our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP.  We had a great Beta program in the spring/summer.  We are on target for a release very soon.  One of the things we were waiting for was Oracle 11g Release 2.  This is now officially out and we are testing our MDX Provider with 11gR2.  The performance of the OLAP cubes in many cases has improved significantly and that is great news.  The first version of our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP will support an ODBO interface and will allow you to connect from Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.  We will have a session at Oracle OpenWorld on October 12th at 5:30pm where we will demo this solution.  This is not a spreadsheet add-in like what Oracle had in 10g.  Rather, our solution is an MDX Provider so technically any MDX compliant analysis tool will be able to connect to Oracle OLAP.  Version 1 of the MDX Provider is being extensively tested with Excel as there is no spreadsheet add-in for 11g OLAP and many of our Beta customers were quite keen to connect Excel to 11g OLAP.

New BI Features in Excel 2010

The Technical Preview for Office 2010 is now out and there are a lot of new BI related features in Excel.  On his blog, Chris Webb has a post describing these at: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4645.entry.  Worth looking at.  At Simba, we are looking at how Excel 2010 will work with SAP BW and Oracle OLAP.  When possible, I will blog more about this.

MDX Query Language, XMLA, ODBO and IBM

I was recently poking around to see what IBM is doing in the MDX query language space.  I tend to discuss the MDX query language space rather than OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) or XML for Analysis (XMLA) because MDX is really the core of multi-dimensional connectivity as I see it.

IBM announced its DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, code-named Cobra http://www.idug.org/component/content/article/12-news/11924-db2-97.html which has extended IBM's support for MDX.  I have not yet had a chance to try out this software.  If you are interested, there is more information on IBM's MDX query language support in Cubing Services at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.dwe.cubemdx.doc/mdx_concepts.html.  IBM Cubing Services also supports ODBO and the information for this is at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.dwe.cubeserv.doc/topics/c_cub_odbo.html.

It is also worth looking at the following slide deck http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/data/sw-library/education/bichats/20090130.pdf.  If you look at the slide on Page 9, it seems that IBM will have Cognos, AlphaBlox and third party apps connect to Cubing Services via the MDX query language.  This is a significant point to note for those of us in the MDX world because this means IBM is treating MDX as a first class interface - IBM's own apps will also use MDX to connect to Cubing Servcies.  I take this as another strong vote for MDX as the de-facto multi-dimensional query language standard.

I am also a strong believer in Excel as BI client.  Users seem to love Excel and Microsoft is investing significantly in Office/Excel BI.  When looking at the IBM slide deck, it is interesting to note that they specifically call out Excel as a client for Cubing Services - both on page 9 and page 19.

MDX Query Language and SAP BusinessObjects Roadmap

Larry Sackett, who is writing a book about SAP BW and the MDX query language http://www.sap-press.com/product.cfm?account=&product=H3066&shoppingcart=002, recently posted a blog entry about the SAP BusinessObjects roadmap.  Very straightforward and concise and worth a quick read: http://lbsackett.typepad.com/larry_sackett/2009/06/index.html.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release 2

Not sure if you saw this... http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx  Some good details about the next version of SQL Server.

MDX query language for Oracle 11g OLAP update

We have been getting very good responses to our Beta for the MDX query language provider for Oracle 11g OLAP and have decided to extend the Beta till the end of May.  Anyone who joins the Beta gets a copy of this ODBO provider that is usable until the end of this year.  You can sign up here: http://www.simba.com/evaluate-MDX-Provider-for-Oracle-OLAP.htm.

Things have been going well with the development of the ODBO provider.  We have been working closely with the Oracle OLAP team and getting good feedback from them as well.  They have been helping us make sure we have a really solid, well-tested product.

One interesting thing we found from some of the Beta customers is that they thought this was an Excel only solution.  Yes, we are focusing all the efforts for v1 on Excel, but this is planned to be a full blown MDX provider for Oracle OLAP.  Therefore, you will get the entire MDX query language and this interface will be similar to what you have with Microsoft Analysis Services or SAP Business Warehouse.  Although v1 will be ODBO only, we are planning to support XMLA in future versions.  The priorities for what we support and when will be customer driven.  One question I have is after Excel, which MDX application do you think we should test with and support next:

1. SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports

2. SAP Business Objects Voyager

3. MicroStrategy 9

4. Microsoft Reporting Services

5. Microsoft SharePoint BI

6. IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 8

7. Panorama NovaView

or something else?

A really good analysis of the SAP and Teradata partnership

Stephen Swoyer at TDWI wrote a really good analysis of the SAP and Teradata partnership http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9428.  It is definitely worth a read. The core idea is that they will deliver SAP BW on top of Teradata.  Some interesting points:

1. Miles Stephenson from Teradata is quoted as saying "we've got alignment at the highest levels of the companies, and ... we have these R&D relationships, so both ... putting skin in the game when it comes to money and … [R&D] effort".  This is an important point in that it means this is not just a pat each other on the back partnership or a reseller agreement, but a deeper partnership where SAP and Teradata will actually deliver some product.

2. According to Franz Aman from SAP "There's a lot of streaming and optimizing needed for the sheer amounts of data that are being shuffled in and consumed [by BW]. We can't just provide BW on top of general purpose databases like Oracle and DB2; we need to go beyond that and offer BW on top of finely-tuned databases that are meant to be real-time, meant to be highly scalable. Certainly, Teradata fits that bill."  This indicates they will leverage some of the advanced features of Teradata.  This is very interesting from a performance and scability point of view because that is where Teradata differentiates.

3. This could really drive Teradata's business: "Teradata officials ... talk up the possibility of new customer converts -- drawn (in this case) by the promise of running NetWeaver BI on top of Teradata's putatively affordable Extreme Data appliance".

Also, today, Teradata does not have much of an OLAP strategy and with this announcement, you will eventually have BW OLAP cubes on top of Teradata.  My company, Simba, helps SAP with their MDX solution for BW so we are definitely interested in seeing more BW implementations.

BI in the Cloud?

I saw this article entitled "Microsoft to bring BI to the cloud" http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/News.asp?sub=true&id=53024. Not sure what it will mean but seems to be a tie-in to Office 15 which is a long way off. We did see an early preview of Office 14 (also called Office 2010) and there were some interesting things there with respect to BI. As soon as this hits official Beta, we can test more and know for sure how things will look. We are interested in testing Office 2010 against both SAP BW MDX and Oracle OLAP MDX.

Microsoft's Project Gemini

Donald Farmer from Microsoft speaks to Stephen Swoyer at TDWI about Microsoft's Project Gemini.  More details emerge of Gemini.  http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9386  Apparently Donald says that any ad hoc business intelligence clients like Tableau or Business Objects can connect to the Gemini cubes.  This would be very interesting because you can extend beyond Excel!  I am assuming that you would query these cubes using MDX and would connect via either ODBO or XMLA.

Microsoft Excel pivot tables and Oracle 11g OLAP Option

We have launched the beta of the MDX provider for Oracle 11g OLAP Option.  This is really an ODBO provider for Oracle OLAP that supports the MDX query language.  You can find the press release here: http://www.simba.com/news/Native-Microsoft-Excel-Connector-to-Oracle-OLAP-Goes-Beta.htm and you can sign up for the Beta here: http://www.simba.com/evaluate-MDX-Provider-for-Oracle-OLAP.htm.  Looking forward to hearing people's comments.

Microsoft Excel pivot tables and SAP NetWeaver BW for free!

I am at the SAP BI and Portals conference this week.  I attended a session yesterday morning entitled "Guidelines for analyzing your BI data using Microsoft Excel pivot tables" that was given by Josh Djupstrom.  I admit that I am biased because it was the MDX 2005 query language technology from Simba that made this connectivity possible.  However, aside from my bias, this was actually a very good session.  Unfortunately, it was at 8:30 in the morning so attendance was probably lighter than it would have been if the session were at a more amenable time.

 

The presentation from Josh was well done.  I spoke to Josh after the presentation and found out he is part of the NetWeaver RIG (regional implementation group).  The RIG is supposed to help customers with their more challenging NetWeaver issues.  Josh tells me that they are quite busy these days which I assume is a good thing.  When I asked Josh about his experience with Excel pivot tables and NetWeaver BW, he told me that he had not used this until he was told a few days ago that he would be presenting on the topic.  He told me that he went to try out Excel pivot tables and it was easy to get things up and running.  He was quite impressed at how easy it was to use and how functional it was.  And he did not even need to know how to write MDX language queries!

 

The people in the audience seemed to like the Excel pivot tables with NetWeaver BW functionality.  What also amazed a number of these people was that they do not have to pay extra for this functionality.  This functionality comes with NetWeaver BW 7 and since pretty much everyone has Excel on their desktop, this is really plug and play.

 

The free part of the Excel pivot tables connectivity is important because it seems there is some concern by SAP customers that SAP wants to charge SAP customers for the Business Objects applications as a premium offering.  This actually makes a lot of sense considering how much SAP spent to acquire Business Objects.  Aside from the cost to acquire Business Objects, SAP is actually spending a lot of time and resources on making sure the Business Objects applications work very well against the SAP suite.  This is something that I don't think a lot of people realize is a very difficult task.  Sure, prior to the acquisition, Business Objects as well as other BI vendors claimed their products worked well against SAP.  However, having been in the data connectivity space for 12 years now, I know this is no trivial task.  The fact that the SAP and Business Objects people are working so closely now tells me that the next generation of Business Objects applications will truly be optimized for SAP connectivity and customers will benefit greatly.  The challenging part for SAP will be that if they do a good job (and there is not reason to believe they won't), then the customers will never realize how good they have it.

 

Back to Excel pivot tables and NetWeaver BW, besides there being no cost for existing BW and Excel users, as Josh said, this is easy to get up and running.  Also, one of the people at the session that I spoke to told me her CIO was going to love this.  She told me her CIO is a Microsoft guy and the fact that he gets to use a Microsoft BI client against the SAP BW system would be a huge win.  And the sad part is that they never knew about this before.  Go figure.

 

I can understand from an SAP Business Objects point of view, this is not something from which they can generate extra revenue.  However, it does add value for their customers and in a recession, it is all about adding value.  Also, think about what kind of upgrade path to something like XCelsius that SAP could give its customers...