Panorama Business Intelligence

In the past year I‘ve been exposed to a world that I knew very little about, the world of Google. Sure, just like everyone else around me, I knew that Google is great as a search engine and has also gotten into Apps but I never really understood the full potential in that thing known as “the Google platform”.

After a year that saw us become partners with Google and where we developed some very interested stuff with the industry giant, I came to realize there is a whole lot more to Google than one might realize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the more interesting angles from my personal perspective is the iGoogle platform. I use iGoogle mostly to place, on a single screen, my Gmail, Google Calendar, weather, news and some other personal stuff and find it very useful. The big moment of clarity came when I participated in a customer meeting and they shared with me how they were thinking about creating an iGoogle-like solution to compliment SAP Portal.

 This statement completely blew my mind away! How in the world could a fortune 100 company even think about making something that is so consumer focused and make it relevant to the the enterprise?

The idea was actually very simple. They were trying to deploy personal dashboards for users to be able to customize and “make their own”. The goal was to create, using custom coding, an iGoogle clone where people could bring together personal stuff with key BI data into a single page.

Because iGoogle didn’t allow the exposure of enterprise data, The customer was basically considering the idea of developing a solution that would let them host, inside their SAP Portal, Google gadgets. The expectation was for a very long and complex project.

We met with the customer to talk about how they could use, in production, our new solution for Google applications wherein they would analyze their SAP BW or SQL AS cubes right from within Google apps.

When they saw the solution they asked one question that changed everything, “Can we take the reports that you’ve built in Google apps and expose them as gadgets within iGoogle?”

Fortunately our answer was, yes!

It was at that moment that they realized that instead of building their own iGoogle, they could actually use the real iGoogle.

The images below show an example. They are of an iGoogle dashboard that shows multiple reports that bring in live data from an enterprise data warehouse combined with some personal gadgets into a single page.

So what do you think? Can Google get into the game of Dashboards and Portals?