Panorama Business Intelligence

Where should SAP customers spend their BI budget?

Some BI vendors today are telling SAP customers – “solve your problems by using my platform on top of BW”:

“We’re working [to] encapsulate [reporting and analytics] by putting [them] in a platform that offers better performance and is more cost-effective than SAP BW,” says Piet Loubser, senior vice-president and director of market intelligence with Business Objects. “It leverages the ETL connectivity we got with Acta, and the Acta Rapid Marts are now bundled on to the appliance, so you’ve got the database preconfigured, you’ve got the ETL preconfigured, you’ve got the models preconfigured, and you have this certified connectivity into SAP and BW.”

Is that the best answer? Yes for the BI vendors that are trying to take advantage of some challenges found in the SAP BW world, but based on my experience I would say this is a bad approach for customers. What I’ve learned from our experience with SAP customers is that performance can be significantly improved and optimized. The new BI accelerator as well as great design can do miracles to the SAP platform. So why should customers opt for another complex platform layer? Sounds like a bandage approach to me.

If you use BW make sure you optimize it before you choose another platform, and if you are looking for better front-end applications you don’t necessarily have to use another platform on top of BW to get that. You should opt for a solution that works natively on top of SAP BW.