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.

Webinar - More SAP BI Distribution Options

In SAP BI 4.2, SP4, you can experience a broad range of distribution options from within the BI Launchpad interface. There is no need to go outside of the BI Launchpad interface for new destination types, enhanced print controls, greater encryption options, and a wider variety of format types, because they are all available right there, at your fingertips, inside the BI Launchpad interface.

Why do you need enhanced distribution? Let's consider destination types as an example.

Firstly, you need enhanced destination types to be sure that you can push, pull, print or place information to the appropriate destinations in your workflows. Appropriate destinations are the ones that ensure the information is where it is needed, and where it will do the most good.

Secondly, enhanced destination types improve your ability to govern the flow of information, ensuring that your business intelligence does not go where it shouldn't. Using enhanced destination types improves information governance, and contributes to the development of a culture of compliance.

Typically, your distribution options will consist of BI Inbox, Email, FTP Server, File System, or SFTP Server, but with the APOS Distribution Server / BI Launchpad integration, you will see a much greater variety of destination types:

SAP takes great care to promote the SAP Partner Ecosphere, because they know they will be much more agile if they do not try to be all things to all organizations. Instead, they focus on vision (the SAP BI Convergence strategy, for example), and on the core capabilities that enable that vision. If you want to use SAP BusinessObjects in a novel or unique way, well, that's what the SAP Partner Ecosphere is for.

The APOS Distribution Server / BI Launchpad integration is an outstanding example of SAP's commitment to their customers through the SAP Partner Ecosphere, and an outstanding example of the SAP Partner Ecosphere in action.

If you want to see enhanced distribution in action, please tune in for our webinar:

Register for this webinar
When: Wednesday, November 15, 2 pm EST
Enhanced Distribution & Integration
of BI Content into Business Workflows…

In this webinar, Jason Young of Computer Services Inc. (CSI) joins us to describe how CSI used enhanced distribution techniques to integrate SAP BusinessObjects into their core bank processing solution.

Webinar - Making SAP BI Administration Exciting

Well, okay, my title may be overselling BI administration a tiny bit.

In fact, as BI topics go, administration may seem one of the least exciting. But managing administration tasks well is the first step toward enabling the pursuit of all of those other, more exciting BI topics.

Many administrative tasks can be both labor-intensive and time-sensitive, meaning that you need to throw resources at the tasks to ensure timely fulfillment of service level agreements with your information consumers.

The result is a double dose of undesirable: your resource costs go up and you don't have the resources to tackle initiatives with much higher ROI. You're paying more and getting less. You're undermining your ability to deliver progressive BI capabilities to your stakeholders, and as an unintended consequence, you're robbing them of competitive advantage.

Without a progressive approach to your BI platform, your management of administration tasks may just be increasing the technical debt in that platform, and the vicious cycle continues.

Sorry, did I say I was trying to make BI administration exciting? I meant terrifying. The truth is that most BI administration teams would prefer to live in less interesting times.

On November 2, 2017, we hosted a webinar that explores ways to automate and simplify the many time- and labor-intensive SAP BI administrative tasks faced by administrators on an ongoing and recurring basis. We looked at tips and techniques for reducing, preventing and managing the many chaotic activities, events and factors that drain your administrative resources and interfere with your ability to deliver timely BI content to your information consumers.

View this webinar on demand

Administrative difficulties arise from many causes, including the volume and complexity of content, growing user expectations, the proliferation of data sources, greater security, governance and compliance requirements, and the rise of user-driven content. None of these trends will make BI administration easier, but you can use the APOS Administrator solution to automate and simplify the most resource-intensive administrative tasks, and to liberate resources for progressive BI initiatives.

Solution Spotlight - APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 is very flexible in how it lets you adopt the new semantic layer and UNX universe, but it is in your organization's best interest to adopt the UNX universe sooner rather than later. Essentially, you have three options:

• Stay fully on UNVThis option does not require any immediate action, but simply maintaining your UNV universes means you will slowly fall behind the technology curve as the SAP BI convergence strategy continues its inexorable course.
• Move fully to UNXThis option allows you to take full advantage of new SAP BI capabilities, but it requires great efforts to update skill sets, convert universes, and repoint reports.
• Retain some UNV, while performing all new development in UNXThis option allows you to transition at your own speed to UNX, taking advantage of new capabilities where they provide the most value, while preserving UNV universes that perform well. In the short term, you will have more maintenance, testing, and documentation as downsides to this approach, but it provides the most flexibility for a considered migration effort.

When you are ready to adopt the UNX universe, APOS has a solution to help you achieve your objectives as painlessly as possible.

APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence

The migration to UNX universes is a daunting project for many organizations. While the conversion of individual universes may be manageable, the repointing of all the associated Web Intelligence reports is a vastly bigger initiative. The APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence allows you to address the size and scope of such initiatives, providing strong process execution, effective and safe management of BI assets, and efficient methods for containing IT resource costs.

A fully supported solution, APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence delivers:

• Bulk conversion of universes from UNV to UNX format
• Bulk repointing of Web Intelligence reports to new UNX universe
• Automated, high volume testing of reports to validate accuracy
• Tightly controlled, project-based methodology

Learn more about the APOS WebI Migrator

Solution Spotlight - APOS Validation Manager

The increasing pace of technological change, the growing volume of data, and its complexity, make automated report testing an ongoing subject of interest for BI platform managers and administrators.

From full-version migration to in-place upgrade to day-to-day report development and management, report testing can be a labor- and resource-intensive activity. The APOS Validation Manager solution presents a project-based, highly controlled environment for testing reports. It works with:

• SAP Web Intelligence
• Analysis for Office
• Crystal Reports
• Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Use Validation Manager log in to your source BI system, search for report objects, add the report objects to a project, set the target BI system connection information, and import the files into your project for testing.

Simplify the import operation by using other APOS solutions such as APOS Insight or the InfoScheduler or Instance Manager modules of the APOS Administrator solution, or you can import by specifying schedules or from existing instances.

Validation Manager tells you when report validation is failed, successful, or successful with warnings, simplifying your testing process and allowing you to increase the speed of report implementation.

Validation Manager provides numerous benefits:

• Rapid technology adoption ensuring timely and accurate information for decision-making workflows
• Increase the scope of your migration testing sample, and the depth of testing
• Improved internal control governance for SOX compliance and other regulatory requirements
• Implement database / schema changes and upgrades, semantic layer changes, and vendor-based data source changes more quickly and dependably
• Efficient resource management

Learn more about APOS Validation Manager…

Update: SAP BusinessObjects Semantic Layer Webinar

SAP's Pierpaolo Vezzosi joined us on February 16, 2017, to talk about what's new in the SAP BusinessObjects semantic layer. Back on February 2, it was SAP's Gregory Botticchio who joined us to talk about what's new in Web Intelligence. Taken together, these webinars give us a great view of the current and future states of the SAP BusinessObjects platform.

Pierpaolo's presentation featured a wealth of information, especially for people working with HANA and BW. He spoke specifically about:

•  Linked Universes
• Universes on BEx query
• HANA

Below, I provide a fairly detailed look at the topics discussed, but it would definitely be worth your while to view the webinar on demand, as Pierpaolo provides live demonstrations on all of these topics, as well as a lively Q & A at the end.

Direct & Online Access to HANA

SP3 saw the addition of Direct access and Online access as methods to access HANA, allowing Web Intelligence reports to access HANA data without the need to build a universe between them, with best practices enabled.

Pierpaolo provided live demonstrations of Direct and Online access to HANA from Web Intelligence using the newer DHTML interface, because, as he reiterated, this is where most new development will occur, due to the impending deprecation of Java applets.

He discussed a number of access methods in detail, and when to use them:

• HANA online - best for exploration. It is fast and best practices are enabled by default. By default, you can return only 5,000 rows, but the user can override this default. However, "good" reports in Web Intelligence don't return this many rows. The big constraint with online is that all calculations and filtering are pushed back to the HANA system, which means that some complex Web Intelligence calculation are not available in this mode.
• HANA direct on relational sources - has all the functionality of Web Intelligence, including the complex calculations not available in online mode, and the best performance / cost ratio for reporting. The recommendation is that you start the design process in online mode to discover the data and the shape of the data, then move to HANA direct mode to make all Web Intelligence functionality available.
• HANA direct on OLAP sources - if you need hierarchies. OLAP on HANA direct may be marginally slower, so if you don't need hierarchies, stick with HANA direct relational mode.
•  HANA via a universe - if you need to customize your access to HANA. For example, if you want to rename objects and do not have write access to HANA views, you can use a universe to make access more friendly, or if you want to add a layer of security on top of HANA, but in general, SAP does not recommend using universes for HANA access. The default should be to use HANA views.

Authoring UNX Universes on BEx Queries

You can author a UNX universe on a BEx query as a means of improving user adoption. Users have welcomed the ability to access BW directly with Web Intelligence, but many have found BEx queries to be not business-user-friendly. Building a UNX universe on a BEx query simplifies the view of the BEx query for business users. Pierpaolo provides a detailed demonstration on how to author such universes.

Linked Universes

When linked universes were introduced in SAP BusinessObjects XI, their purpose was to make complex universe projects easier to manage. This idea returns in BI 4.2 SP3: You can construct UNX universes and allow objects in those universes to be inherited by a newer universe. Further, when you make changes to the original (or master) universes, the changes are propagated down to the derived universe.

Linked universes allow you to:

• Deliver a modular approach to universe building in the Information Design Tool (IDT)
• Insert the objects of a master UNX into a derived UNX universe, with automatic updates propagation to the derived universe

Use cases for this linked universes include:

• Component Use Case- using a team approach in which each team supplies one or more components for the derived universe (e.g., customers, products, measures)
• Kernel Use Case - building a large data foundation (e.g., the whole data warehouse) in the original universe, then showing subsets of that universe in derived universes (e.g., for Marketing, HR)
• OEM Use Case - building a common universe, which is then extended in derived universes for various customers

Again, Pierpaolo provided a detailed demonstration on linking universes, and it is definitely worth your while to view the webinar on demand for these demonstations.

APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence

Allan Pym, APOS COO, also gave a brief description of the APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence, which enables:

• Bulk conversion of universes from UNV format to UNX format
• High-volume re-pointing of Web Intelligence reports from the old UNV to the new UNX

View this webinar on demand...

"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.

Webinar - Containing the Chaos - Overcoming SAP BI Administrative Challenges

Developing and implementing an agile content storage strategy for your SAP BI deployment is critical to the health of the system and to your ability to respond effectively to administrative challenges and compliance requirements.

The content in your BI deployment is an important asset, but it can also become a liability if there isn’t a strategy in place to control its growth, but often there is a significant volume of unnecessary content in the system, resulting in ‘content chaos’. This chaos only deepens as BI deployments grow and become more oriented toward ad-hoc, self-service reporting.

This potential for content chaos requires development of an agile approach to system storage, retention, and purging, including assessment of storage requirements, distillation of those requirements into rules, and organization and application of those rules within an agile system storage strategy.

In this webinar, we will look at the various challenges and costs of content chaos within the BI environment, how to develop a system storage strategy for overcoming that chaos, and how to make effective use of technologies which target the reduction and containment of chaotic content growth.

Register for the webinar.

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.

Take the survey.

Webinar Today - Agile BI Platform Management at HP Enterprise Services

When: Oct. 1, 2014, 2 pm EDT - Today
Guest Presenter: Niladri Chowdhury, HP Enterprise Services
Register for the webinar. All registrants will receive a link to this and other recorded webinars.

Agility is now the defining quality for BI platform management, because the agile enterprise has become the norm, and an enterprise can only be as agile as its least agile component -- like the weakest link in a chain.

Niladri Chowdhury joins us today to discuss agile BI platform management at HP Services, an enterprise that specializes in helping other enterprises achieve agility. The "Always on" enterprise integrates mobility, connectivity and interactivity. "Always on" means 24/7, and if your business team is making decisions around the clock, your BI platform has to deliver on the same basis.

BI is central to enterprise decision making, but increasing volume and complexity make it increasingly difficult for BI platform managers and administrators to deliver on BI's promises. Everyone has heard the story of the frog in a pot of water that is slowly brought to a boil. The frog doesn't notice the increasing heat and is boiled alive. Being a BI platform manager can feel like that.

What's to be done? You can stand still and lower service levels; you can add resources; or you can look at strategies for achieving agile BI platform management. Join us today to see how HP Enterprise Services is employing the third option with the help of APOS well managed BI solutions.

Self-Service BI - The Business Case for Upgrading to SAPBusinessObjects BI 4

Traditional BI answers known questions. Self-Service BI answers unknown questions.

So say Saskia Battersby and Pierre Leroux in a presentation they delivered at the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference 2012 (Extending Self-Service Capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects BI (PDF)).

Saskia and her colleague Deepa Sankar will be joining us for a webinar on Thursday, July 11, 2013, to discuss The Business Case for Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Part of that business case is the new self-service capabilities of BI 4, and the growing importance of self-service BI for competitive advantage.

What are unknown questions? As Donald Rumsfeld once said:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

While Rumsfeld's statement was widely ridiculed, it is actually quite accurate and succinct. If you don't know how to formulate the questions that challenge your assumptions or fill the gaps in your knowledge, then that information will elude you.

Or, as Mark Twainsaid, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Standard reports answer a set of standard questions on a periodic basis. They provide information on the known knowns and known unknowns -- the information you use to manage your daily operations. But what about those unknown unknowns? How do you find answers when you can't yet formulate the questions? More and more, your competitive advantage depends on learning those unknowns through proactive analytics. Your performance will depend not just on how you react to markets, but also how you predict events and act to take advantage of them. You will be judged not just on what you know, but on what you should have known.

That's where the self-serve aspects of BI have their impact. That's why it's important to take advantage of the new capabilities in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Join us for this informative webinar to learn more.

View the recorded webinar.

Mobile BI - The Business Case for Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4

Business is conducted in real time, and on location, so your BI has to be available in the same manner. Mobile BI confers competitive advantage, and the mobile BI capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 are a large part of the business case for upgrading. No matter how decentralized your workforce and decision makers, they can have the information and analytic power they need when they need it, and where they need it. Every business should build mobility into its BI strategy.

SAP has placed great emphasis on mobile BI in BI 4. Yourmobile workforce can both access information remotely, and also analyze it using applications optimized for mobile devices. The acquisition of Sybase, the consolidation of interfaces, the development of mobile applications, and the strong mobile SDK for third-party application development have all been milestones in the push toward an advanced mobile BI strategy -- providing real-time engagement and collaboration, and instant access to business and location analytics

• See a mobile location intelligence demo.
• Check out the SCN SAP BusinessObjects Mobile Blog

Our upcoming webinar, The Business Case for Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4, addresses mobile BI and many other BI 4 value propositions. SAP's Saskia Battersby and Deepa Sankar will discuss:

• The value SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 brings to your organization
• How it aligns with strategic business intelligence objectives
• How you can increase Return on Investment (ROI)
• How you can lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

View the recorded webinar.

This webinar is the third in a series on migration issues. View other webinars in the series.

Webinar: 5 Ways to Improve Healthcare BI & Outcomes

Join Us for this Important Webinar on Wednesday, April 10, 2013, at 10 am or 4 pm ET
If you work in healthcare Business Intelligence, you know that you inhabit one of the most rapidly evolving, complex, and data critical types of BI environment there is. You also know that the prognosis is for radically and rapidly increasing data governance requirements and information sharing.

BI is critical not just for the business outcomes of provider and payer organizations, but also for clinical outcomes as well. And the continuing development of Meaningful Use strategies and Healthcare Information Exchanges will make the future of healthcare BI platform management extremely challenging.

This webinar discusses how you can manage your SAP BusinessObjects platform to provide better business outcomes, and to complement your organization's electronic health record (EHR) efforts, and its quest for better compliance with local, national and international regulatory standards, and better clinical and healthcare outcomes.
Join us:

View the Recorded Webinar

APOS Insight Lite - BusinessObjects System Metrics

Are you an SAP BusinessObjects platform manager or administrator being asked to do more with less? Do you need a clear inventory of the objects, schedules and instances in your deployment? Do you want to know which objects in your deployment are most frequently used? Most rarely used? Would the ability to analyze and compare report processing windows help you optimize your system?

APOS Insight Lite can help you deal with these questions and more.

APOS Insight Lite is a subset of the services found in the APOS Insight Advanced Solution, a full-featured system metrics, performance analytics, and system planning solution for SAP Business Objects.

Find out more about APOS Insight Lite BusinessObjects system metrics.

Webinar reminder: Well Managed BI Today at 2pm ET

There's still time to register for today's Well Managed BI webinar. APOS COO Allan Pym shows you how  SAP BusinessObjects platform management and administration best practices can liberate your resources for more proactive activities and increase BI ROI.

Redefining BI

In the March 2012 edition of IT in Europe, SearchDataManagement.co.UK's Brian McKenna presents a simplified definition of BI:

Business Intelligence is ripe for defamiliarisation as a term. For IT professionals, the temptation is to understand it to mean query and reporting tools from the BI megavendors. But for one of the finance professionals quoted in this issue of IT in Europe: Data Management & BI Edition, “business intelligence means trying to make money out of data.” [Emphasis added.]

I like this definition, because it takes us closer to first principles. It takes us back to strategic objectives.

When we get set in our ways, comfortable and complacent in the status quo, we start to mistake the practice for the objective. Why do we do things the way we do them? Because that's the way we've always done them.

But the imperative to optimize the top and bottom lines of an enterprise requires us to re-examine our practices on a continuous basis. Can the practice be improved to bring us closer to our strategic objectives? Can a practice be said to be a best practice if it is not connected somehow to the realization of a strategic objective?

As I said, I like the redefinition. However, I don't think it goes far enough. I'm in the Peter Drucker school of thought on this one. Drucker was suspicious of the profit motive as a primary business driver. The purpose of a business, according to Drucker, is to create a customer. By measuring the success of the company against the ongoing relationship with the customer, we create a business that is first and foremost sustainable, but also mutually profitable.

BI's potential contribution to the pursuit of strategic objectives is obvious but not inevitable. BI professionals need to take a progressive approach ‑ to look for ways to achieve strategic objectives through better utilization of the BI platform.

In an article dedicated to the centenary of Drucker's birth, Oliver Marks notes another Drucker maxim: "Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes." For the BI professional, it's not just about improving knowledge, but about improving the way knowledge is stored, managed and disseminated.

From Legacy Headaches to BI ROI

I remember a time when the biggest debate in enterprise IT departments was whether to purchase "best-of-breed" solutions or integrated systems. Line-of-business managers leaned toward the rich functionality of the best-of-breed solutions, and executives and corporate directors were more interested in the wider and easier access to data provided by integrated systems. IT departments were caught in the middle, trying to please multiple masters.

These past battles come down to us as today's legacy applications. The average enterprise IT department may have dozens of software systems to maintain. But they also have to maintain the numerous platforms on which these software systems reside. And sometimes the demise of the platform overtakes the usefulness of the application.

It's a rare crisis that doesn't also present an opportunity to those who can see through the confusion. Many BI platform managers are in this position today. They have under their control a best-of-breed business intelligence solution that can access all enterprise data sources. The BI system is that formerlly elusive combination of best-of-breed solution and integrated system.

When the ROI of a legacy platform or solution is under review, the first question should be whether state-of-the-art systems such as your BI system can absorb the legacy function for increased BI ROI and reduced TCO.

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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US Military Logistics, Well Managed BI

A recent notice published at FedBizOpps.gov declared that the US Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), has renewed its maintenance contract with APOS Systems for the APOS Administrator (InfoScheduler) solution.

The mission (PDF) of the Air Force Materiel Command:

We deliver war-winning expeditionary capabilities to the warfighter through development and transition of technology, professional acquisition management, exacting test and evaluation, and world-class sustainment of all Air Force weapon systems.

AFMC's management and delivery of information is mission critical in the extreme. Lives and national security are at stake, and it is gratifying for us to know that they use our solution to improve the efficiency of their BI platform and the timeliness of information delivery.

But this story is not just about doing the job well. AFMC's use of APOS Administrator also aligns with the Command's recent efforts to streamline their operations for greater efficiency, higher ROI, and lower costs.

As those of you who have been following the well managed BI saga know, APOS solutions are built to help business intelligence platform managers, administrators and technologists make more efficient use of their BI platform. Well managed BI is a quest to climb the capability maturity model (CMM) for BI platform management. The CMM has three levels:

• If you are at the Curative level of the model, your are constantly reacting to system events and information consumer issues. You are in firefighting mode.
•  If you are at the Preventive level, you are actively seeking out and correcting problems before they affect your information consumers.
• If you are at the Progressive level, you are proactively seeking new opportunities to expand the use and ROI of your BI platform for the benefit of different business units.

The Air Force Materiel Command's commitment to the APOS Administrator solution validates our belief that well managed BI is a critical component in any organization's quest to fulfill its core mission.

Learn more about well managed BI. Download the Well Managed BI: Managing Your BI Platform for ROI white paper.

APOS on the Road - 2011

APOS had a very active year at conferences and tradeshows. If we weren’t attending conferences to keep up to date on SAP BusinessObjects, Teradata and Esri solutions, we were actively exhibiting at numerous tradeshows throughout the world.

To all of you who dropped by to see us at these conferences and tradeshows, we thank you. Without your feedback, we can't continue to be the leading provider of well managed BI solutions for SAP BusinessObjects. Our iPad giveaways were just a small token of that appreciation.

The APOS booth at the ASUG/SAP BusinessObjects conference was simply magical — literally. But don't take our word for it: watch this video of Danny Orleans in action.

We are already in the planning stages for next year's conference and tradeshow schedule, and are looking forward to seeing all our old friends and meeting new ones. In the mean time, you can keep in touch with us through our social media. To find out where we'll be next and arrange to meet with members of our team, please feel free to contact Jay Murdoch.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.