What's Happening with SAP's BI Products, and What Does It Mean for You? WIS SAPinsider Q & A

When: May 4, 2015 - 11:30 am ET
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APOS is pleased to present this online live Q & A session in conjunction with SAP and SAPinsider. During this session, SAP product experts will explore how SAP BI 4.2 can enrich the experiences of both users and information consumers.

During planning for this session, the session title went through a few iterations, including:

• Will SAP's BI Tool Convergence and Interoperability Strategy Make Your BI Team Better?
• Platform Progress, Tool Convergence, and Quadrant Qualms….Where are we now??

These titles, and the title we finally settled on, all describe the session accurately, but the last, which was deemed a bit controversial, describes a particular quandary that developed when Gartner published its most recent BI Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

Back in February - on Super Bowl Sunday, to be precise -- Mark Richardson published a critique of Gartner's change in direction. His post was called 'Moving the Goalposts': Why #DataViz Often Fails to Reflect Reality. In his post, Mark noted:

GARTNER has moved their focus for this document away from “the long-standing BI requirement for centrally provisioned, highly governed and scalable system-of-record reporting” – and toward “analytical agility and business user autonomy”. That’s their call – but I think it is the wrong one.

There is a danger in reliance on ad hoc reporting and data visualizations to the exclusion of the underlying data, which is why a “system-of-record” reporting engine is so important.

It’s easy to be deceptive with visualizations, even to deceive yourself, but the real problem in such cases is generally inaccurate data, especially when taken cumulatively, in which case simple, seemingly inconsequential variances can distort the picture and lead to poor decision-making.

What is required above all, as Mark Richardson points out, is stability, accuracy, and governance. Can these qualities be said to be characteristics of a platform?

It has been nearly 2 years since Jayne Landry published Run Simple: Convergence of the SAP BI Product Portfolio. Now, with the release of SAP BI 4.2, it's time to review the progress SAP has made on the platform, and check the convergence and interoperability of the BI tool portfolio.

From the conceptual to the technical, this session will let you explore the boundaries and synergies of the SAP BI 4.2 BI tool set, and discover the potential for Lumira, Design Studio, Web Intelligence, Analysis for Office and HANA within your deployment of the SAP BI platform.

Panelists will include:

• Jayne Landry - Global VP & GM, Business Intelligence, SAP
• Ty Miller - Senior Director of Solution Management for Enterprise Business Intelligence, SAP
• Olivier Duvelleroy - Senior Director, Solution Management, Business Intelligence, SAP
• Alexander Peter - Product Manager, SAP
• David Stocker - Senior Product Manager, SAP
• Gregory Botticchio - Product Manager, Web Intelligence, SAP
• Adrian Westmoreland - Product Manager, SAP

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