Panorama Business Intelligence

I just read this post from Mark Smith titled “Is SAP ready for BI”, Mark talks about the fact that SAP BW customers are unhappy and that SAP is not catching up on the BI front. As a relatively new partner to SAP and as a company that is building a solution that runs natively on BW I must disagree with Mark.

While the front end tools might not be the ultimate dream of information workers the platform is actually extremely powerful…. Not that it is the best BI platform overall but there is no doubt that it is the best BI platform for SAP’s business suites and SAP’s data. Relative to any other solution you can now easily bring the data you need in a useful way.  I’ve been in the BI business for many years now, the challenge is always around bringing the data to make it usable…. The apps are the easy part. SAP now offers the best platform to deal with its own data and no competitor can do it in a better way. The interesting thing is that BI companies such as BOBJ or Cognos are leveraging the fact that there is so much unhappiness with BW’s front end and making it sound as if they can solve these problems… by taking and building another platform layer that sits on top of SAP….Have you spoken to a customer that actually tried that route? You will find out very quickly that it is an even bigger challenge… now they have to support another layer of metadata, security, ETL, connectivity…. And eventually it appears that those information workers, for whom we do all of this, are still not using the tools that Cognos or BOBJ provide them.

Would love to hear your feedback