In what seems to be a speedy decision to clean up an overlapping product line, following its acquisition of Business Objects (BOBJ), SAP has decided to retire the Business Objects Performance Management product. Taking its place would be SAP Strategy Management (a product biguru is SAP certified). SAP Strategy Management is the new name for what used to be Pilot Software’s flagship product PilotWorks product, which SAP acquired in February 2007.
Business Objects has just released the updated Xcelsius 2008 after a long beta program. What are the top new features of this exciting data visualization and dashboard tool? Let’s find out the top 10: Copy-Paste- Productivity is bound to increase through collaborative development now as it is possible to copy-paste components between XLF files. Filtered Rows - Selector components like List box and combo-box now include a new option in the insert-options list.
SaaS has taken off in a big way in the past few years. And BI has not been lagging behind. For leading vendors like BOBJ (an SAP company) or Cognos (an IBM company), it’s going to be close to 2 years now since they started their SaaS BI. What exactly are the advantages of SaaS over the traditional approach? Benefits are aplenty, from zero costs of purchasing hardware, hiring of key IT personnel like system administrators and DBAs, to minimal implementation and maintenance costs.
Last time I talked about the trends in the BI space. Let’s look into one of those trends - M&As and how it is shaping BI as we know it. A recent BusinessWeek article claimed the end of the best-of-breed approach to BI with the demise of the major pure-play BI vendors like BOBJ now owned by SAP thanks to a friendly takeover or Hyperion acquired by Oracle or the latest - IBM’s acquisition of Cognos.
By definition Business Intelligence (BI) has been about making decisions based on information obtained from meaningful data. At one point of time we had terms like decision support systems (DSS) to define technology which has finally evolved into BI as we know it now. Or has it? Somewhere along the line, we became entangled in the technology aspect of it and with all the buzzwords of data warehousing, data mining, dimensional modeling, data marts, **CRM **and **SCM **it is not difficult to see why.
