Wednesday, September 28, 2016

"Faster, Simpler, Smarter" - Irfan Khan's TechEd 2016 Customer Keynote and Well Managed BI

In his TechEd 2016 keynote address, Irfan Khan, CTO for SAP Global Customer Operations (GC0), marked the twentieth anniversary and spoke with customers, asking them:

"How can you become faster, simpler, smarter, in the context of your digital journey?"

He noted that Moore's Law continues to be in force as memory and computing power double every 12 to 18 months, and that this growth was part of what was fueling disruptive times in the world of data science. SAP BusinessObjects Cloud was designed to coalesce BI, predictive, and planning to a single platform in response to these disruptive times.

Irfan's emphasis was on the SAP BW/4HANA platform, and he used the "data lake" concept to talk about not just the volume of data the HANA platform was capable of containing, but also how available that data was for analysis and decision-making. Unlike the standard data warehouse or data mart, HANA is not limited to aggregated data. When you query or run an algorithm against HANA, you are not querying merely the rolled-up summaries of the data, but the entire data lake itself, meaning the Devil can't hide in the details.

If you are a BI platform manager or administrator, you know the volume of your data and the complexity of your information requirements are growing at an ever-increasing pace, and in parallel with Moore's Law. Irfan told us that "Every aspect of our environment is changing. We are entering a digital environment." For BI people, this sea change manifests itself in the growth of real-time and ad hoc business intelligence, and the corresponding importance of proactive BI administration.

However, this growth in the importance of BI to the enterprise, and the need for BI administrators to work "faster, simpler, smarter," does not necessarily come with a corresponding growth in available resources, so in order for BI platform managers to work faster and simpler, they most definitely need to find ways to work smarter.

APOS Systems has been the source for BI solutions to help SAP customers running SAP BusinessObjects achieve "faster, simpler, smarter" BI platform management and administration capabilities, or what we like to call Well Managed BI. These solutions let you:
  • Formulate deep knowledge of your system, so you know what is happening, why it is happening, and who is making it happen
  • Bulk manage objects, schedules and instances to improve service and liberate your resources for higher-value activities
  • Implement an advanced content storage strategy to protect your content, and to meet internal governance and regulatory compliance requirements
  • Employ advanced query governance to ensure your BI system makes the most of its data connectivity
  • Perform precision content delivery to ensure the right content gets to the right people at the right time in the right format with the right security
  • Streamline migration and upgrade processes and automate report object and instance testing
  • Expand data connectivity options to leverage existing data sources and calculations
  • Expand Analysis for Office scheduling, instance management, document backup and archive, impact analysis, and use Analysis for Office as a data source for other SAP BI tools


For more information on how APOS can help your BI platform management become faster, simpler, and smarter, visit our Well Managed BI Solutions page.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Webinar: SAP's Alexander Peter on Analysis for Office

What: What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office Webinar
When: Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016 – 11:00 am EDT
Guest Presenter: Alexander Peter, Product Manager, SAP

SAP’s Alexander Peter joins us to discuss what’s new and what’s ahead for SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office (Analysis for Office).

If you were able to attend our SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office - Scheduling, Distributing, Managing webinar back in June, you may remember that we promised to host a session to focus on what features are coming in the near future, and what the long term plans for Analysis for Office are. This is that session, and Alexander will be here to answer your questions on all aspects of the current version of Analysis for Office, as well as on the roadmap.

SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office is the BI information analysis and delivery tool of choice for many users, both because of its capabilities and its ease of use. If your organization is looking for ways to increase both of these features of Analysis for Office, then you should definitely attend this webinar.

Many of APOS' well managed BI solutions can help you perform many Analysis for Office asks more efficiently and effectively.
  • Scheduling - APOS Administrator and APOS Publisher can help you to schedule reports for personal, team and recurring reports, for large and diverse groups (including external stakeholders) to a variety of format and destination types.
  • Management and Administration - APOS Administrator, APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight can help you with bulk instance management, document archive/backup/selective restore, and impact analysis.
  • Using Analysis for Office as a Data Source - The APOS Data Gateway solution lets you use Analysis for Office documents as a data source for your other BI projects in, for example, SAP Design Studio or SAP Lumira. The reason this a desirable capability is that it allows you to leverage the discovery and analytical work done in Analysis for Office, and to avoid repeating the same work in other analytical and visualization applications.

You can find out more about how APOS well managed BI solutions can help get the most out of Analysis for office here, and please join Alexander and our APOS team as we explore continuous improvement of the SAP Analysis for Office offering in this informative webinar.