BI for SCM

What This Article Covers

• What has happened since business objects was acquired by SAP?
• Confusion on the term business intelligence.
• What are the benefits for customers of SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects?

The Conceptual Benefits

Even since SAP purchase Business Objects the question of how the two solutions would be integrated has been discussed. Prior to the purchase of Business Objects (BO), BO was considered one of the better report creation and data mining tools. SAP has a data warehouse product called Business Warehouse (BW). So the natural integration between the systems is to have BW serve as the backend data repository and for BO to serve as the front-end. At one client I am familiar with the future state design is for the data to be simply copied from BW to BO and then for BO queries to be performed on this data. The advantage of this design is it leverages the best of what BW and BO have to offer, but the downside is obviously latency.

Business Intelligence Confusion

One of the confusing things about the term business intelligence (BI), is it combines several different capabilities that tend to reside at different vendors. One capability is the data warehouse, which is all about designing software to manage large amounts of data to support many parts of the organization from one source (unless a data mart approach is taken), and the other is report creation and data mining, which is about the interface and search algorithms and ways of viewing the data.

 It is not necessary to try to get both capabilities from one vendor as they are different software capabilities and it would be unlikely that one vendor would be the best in each (or that one vendor would meet your industry and company needs in both areas). However, even though this is known to veterans, the vendors have a way of tricking buyers into giving them all their business rather than using a blended approach. As Pentaho, an open source data warehouse points out.

“BI Standardization” has emerged as a key marketing theme for proprietary BI vendors over the last decade. The idea behind BI standardization is that by selecting one vendor to address any and all BI projects within large organizations, that organizations will be able to use BI more strategically, and will reduce the costs associated with BI. The presumed incremental costs associated with deploying multiple different BI technologies are usually attributed to redundant training costs and skill-sets, reduced “volumepurchasing” power, redundant hardware, and other items. - Pentaho – A New Business Model to Drive Business Intelligence Acceptance and Adoption

SAP often labels BW product as a leading data warehouse, however, data warehouse experts do not agree. Most see it as essentially living off of the sell in capability of the rest of the SAP suite.

What Are the Benefits for Customers of the BO Acquisition?

However, several years since the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, and while Business Objects is thrown into many marketing documents, the integration of BO into SAP products remains weak. Several products are so buggy that they are not really additions to SAP’s stable of usable products. For instance, I still have to use BEx because the highly touted Business Objects front end to the BW, while showing some potential, is so buggy is has not been usable. Thus the purchase has not lived up to the hype.

http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/viewtopic.php?t=112015

However here are a few examples as well…

Comment 1: I am getting worried about the whole SAP takeover. They kept saying it will remain a separate company and nothing will change. Now with this support issue, no conference this year, and our reps have been really bad to responding to us! I think BO will never be the same now that it’s under SAP

Comment 2: Being an IT professional how can anyone even think of finding excuses. Have you not heard about testing, QA, Pilots, integration testing. Is this the first mass migration anyone has ever attempted?
How would you like to be manufacturer of a product and do something where your customers have no way to service the product? remember this was DONE by BOBJ and not an accident

Conclusion

Up to this point SAP has badly mismanaged the BO acquisition and customers are complaining mightily. From this vantage point, there seems to be very little benefit to customers of the Business Objects Acquisition. Customer service has gone done, the price has gone up, BO is not well-integrated to the BW, and the main use of BO now is to serve as a marketing support for SAP products. For instance, one recent use of BO has been to prop up their rebooted PLM solution. Overall, the BO acquisition has been a negative for customers.

References

http://blogs.oracle.com/datawarehousing/2009/04/data_warehouse_vendor_comparis_1.html

http://www.cio.com/article/490771/SAP_and_Teradata_Deepen_Data_Warehousing_Ties

http://fscavo.blogspot.com/2008/07/sap-botching-up-support-transition-for.html

http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/view/6269

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