BI & Analytics Business Cases in the Time of COVID-19

ASUG’S Undercover CIO notes in Making the Right IT Investments in Uncertain Times that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a shift in how CIOs determine the course of IT investments, citing the ASUG Pulse Check:

47% of respondents said their organizations were not canceling any planned IT initiatives, while nearly half (45%) shared that they are postponing a few planned initiatives. The top reason respondents provided to explain these cancellations was that these initiatives were not considered “core” projects.

Uncertainty has this effect, and everyone wants to manage more efficiently and still be positioned to hit the ground running when that uncertainty is resolved, which is why streamlining is such a common theme:

...you need to look at automation, as well as doing less with physical assets and more with intelligent assets. Your business case for any project right now should be about streamlining.

In BI & Analytics, as elsewhere, streamlining means doing more with less, while ensuring your organization is ready to meet an uncertain future.

Streamlining through automation is a consistent theme throughout APOS Well Managed BI & Analytics solutions. They let you take control of your deployments, helping you to manage effectively in the present and prepare for what’s next.

SAP BI 4.0 "Monsta" Project - Testing the Limits

The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network is an SAP Research initiative designed to promote project-based co-innovation between SAP and network members.

David Cruickshank blogs about the so-called "Monsta" BI 4.0 implementation, which is the single largest such project attempted so far. The deployment reflects many of the current, industry-wide BI trends:

Developments within SAP[,] and BI as an industry itself, suggests [sic] strongly that this growth trend in analytics is nearly epic, and with the release of HANA, the push for BI on mobile devices, and an "analytics anywhere, anytime" direction, the need to scale up is [sic] and to be capable of supporting larger and larger environments is predictable. A truly large BOE environment could be anything larger than 2-4,000 users concurrent (usually equivalent to a 20-50,000 total user base for BOE), which would start pushing up against ~100 CPU. This COIL project tests architectural, scalability and performance limits of valuable interest serving as a confidence builder internally, but also externally. Future customers for environments of this size would feel much more comfortable to find that SAP tested this in our own labs prior prove that it works. To develop the tests and to produce such proof points as an orchestrated co-innovation activity among multiple partners from the SAP ecosystem adds validation and opens up new opportunity to accelerate innovation on this front.

The project's stated objectives:

• Establish customer confidence in large scale BI deployments
• Optimize SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Architecture

The project is not only monstrous in size:

• 2 - 4,000 concurrent users
• 20 - 50,000 total user base
• ~100 CPUs

...but in scope as well, testing SAP BI 4.0's capabilities against the market's demand for:

• Extensive analytics
• Mobile BI
• Pervasive BI
• Scalability

Early results are positive, and David assures us that the project has generated enough comments, reports and insights to fill numerous white papers and tech briefs. We look forward to those.

Follow further results at David Cruickshank's blog.

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