Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Ongoing BARC BI Survey 2015 Preliminary Results

Preliminary data from the 2015 BARC BI Survey indicate that use of BI is increasing and becoming more pervasive in departments besides Finance and upper management:

Following rather stagnant numbers in 2014, this year reveals an upward trend across all business departments. The biggest increase can be found in production departments (from 21 percent to 53 percent). The operationalization of BI has progressed rapidly in recent years. This is particularly evident in big data analytics scenarios where ever-increasing volumes of machine and sensor data are being used in the production process – for example for optimizing production processes or predictive maintenance of machines.

The Business Application Research Center (BARC) is an enterprise software industry analyst doing research in data management, business intelligence, customer relationship management, and enterprise content management.

Participation has its benefits. If you take the survey, you will:
  • Receive a summary of the results from the full survey
  • Be entered into a draw to win one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers
  • Ensure that your experiences are included in the final analyses

Sounds like it might be worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you complete the survey.


Monday, May 4, 2015

Web Intelligence, Lumira and the Road Ahead

Our SAPinsider-hosted Q&A on April 22, 2015 was a resounding success. It featured a cast of SAP luminaries:
  • Ty Miller - Vice President, Lumira Product Management, SAP
  • Frank Prabel - Senior Director of Product Management, SAP
  • Gregory Botticchio - BI Product Manager, SAP
  • Sylvain Riboud - SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Semantic Layer Area Delivery Manager, SAP
  • Ian Booth - Director Product Management, SAP

Here's Frank Prabel on the road ahead for Web Intelligence:

SAP has a very large installed base of Web Intelligence customers and is committed to investing in the WebI future.

The investment will be partly incremental innovations such as those planned for BI 4.1 SP06 (global input controls, freehand SQL, etc.), but we are also working on key new innovations (commentary, parallel queries, or HANA direct access). Please refer to this Web Intelligence roadmap slide for additional details: