Business Intelligence Services

“The new face of BI for SAP” – this adage sums up the leading role a Business Objects application has played with the business intelligence front-end of SAP applications. Business Objects' suite of BI solutions will be the go-to solutions for reporting, analysis, and dashboard capabilities for SAP customers looking for a fuller, more enhanced suite of BI solutions. In addition, Business Objects brings a number of information management solutions to help customers build out a trusted data foundation.

Business Objects is the leader in the Business Intelligence market, helping organizations make more intelligent decisions – resulting in better business strategy.

The Business Objects premium BI solutions include a full range of core Business Intelligence capabilities, as well as end-to-end information management solutions that have deep integration with SAP applications today. In addition, SAP customers can leverage the BI capabilities of Business Objects to gain access and insight into both SAP and non-SAP data, allowing for a 360-degree view of business operations.

Dashboards

SAP's go-forward product for dash boarding is Business Objects Xclesius, together with Business Objects

Dashboard Builder – a dashboard layout tool that complements Business Objects Xclesius in building out dashboard projects.

Enterprise Reporting

Business Objects Crystal Reports is already tightly integrated with the SAP NetWeaver BI stack as well as with SAP Business Suite, allowing customers to unlock key data stored in these backend applications.

Ad-Hoc Query & Reporting

With Business Objects Web Intelligence, SAP offers a web based Ad-Hoc Query and Reporting tool. With the addition of Business Objects Polestar, SAP now offers customers simple and fast 'Google-like' search access to relevant data via an intuitive interface. Both of these tools are available as part of Business Objects business intelligence platform.

OLAP Analysis

SAP's offerings in this area are the SAP BEx Analyzer (Microsoft Excel-based) and SAP BEx Web Analyzer tools. Business Objects OLAP offering is Business Objects Voyager, which provides an intuitive user interface with seamless guided analysis. Integration of Business Objects Voyager and the two SAP OLAP tools has already begun, under the codename “Pioneer”.

Data Quality and Master Data Management

SAP Net-Weaver Master Data Management allows customers to consolidate and harmonize their master data within heterogeneous IT landscapes. Business Objects Data Quality allows them to identify, correct, and prevent data quality issues – to keep enterprise data consistent. The two tools are already loosely integrated; tighter integration is planned through 2010.

Extract, Transform & Load (ETL)

Business Objects offers SAP customers robust ETL capabilities with Business Objects Data Integrator, which enables exploration, extraction, transformation, and delivery of data anywhere, at any frequency. It can be used by organizations for any small or large ETL project. For example, loading non-SAP data into SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence.

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (SAP NetWeaver VC) will continue to be an integral part of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (SAP NetWeaver CE). SAP will continue to enhance SAP NetWeaver VC by allowing customers to embed business intelligence into business processes via composite applications. Furthermore, between 2009 and 2010, customers will be able to use SAP

NetWeaver VC to embed and call Business Objects Crystal Reports, Business Objects Xclesius, and the planned "Pioneer" product.

A Single Platform

The Business Objects BI solutions described above run on Business Objects Enterprise, a single integrated BI platform. The platform allows thousands of users – both inside and outside the company – to manage, distribute, and secure their reports, dashboards, and so on. Furthermore, this same BI platform directly leverages components of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, as well as SAP Business Suite applications. This, SAP and Business Objects insist, means that SAP customers should continue to build out their data warehousing and information management projects as usual.