"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 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.

See You at SABOC 2014, Booth #105

Will you be there in Dallas / Fort Worth? The APOS team will be at booth #105, ready and willing to talk to you about how we can help you become more agile in your SAP BusinessObjects BI platform management and administration.

We will also be hosting an education session on Agile BI Platform Management at HP Enterprise Services, featuring HP's Niladri Chowdhury. Niladri will be sharing his migration and platform management experiences.

The HP "Always On" initiative positions HP Enterprise Services as an agile enterprise enabling agility in other enterprises. Naturally, they need their SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 platform management to be agile as well. With customers such as the US Navy, the UK Ministry of Defense and NASA, HP ES must also be the agile enterprise which it sells. Using HP products such as HP Vertica and HP Autonomy with SAP BusinessObjects, their IT department is a model for the integration of complex information systems to produce real-time BI and effective data visualization.

If you are experiencing challenges with volume and complexity in your BI deployment, Niladri's experiences will be familiar to you. Find out how he brings agility to the HP Enterprise Services SAP BusinessObjects deployment.

Big Data Analytics Skills Shortage

A recent article at SearchBusinessAnalytics cited "raw and user-unfriendly technology" and lack of "skilled experts" in these technologies as the biggest challenges for large enterprises seeking the considerable benefits of big data analytics. As enterprises become more information driven, and business intelligence and analytics become critical to competitive advantage both strategically and operationally, there just aren't enough skilled personnel to handle the development of the needed predictive modeling and predictive analytics applications.

The greatest need is for more data scientists -- people who have post-graduate educations in statistical analysis. As demand grows, and supply remains relatively constant, individuals with these skills will command larger and larger portions of corporate business analytics budgets.

While this "crisis" seems worrisome, it is a problem that the average business intelligence platform manager would love to have. They would all like to be pushing the data analytics envelope to provide proactive and progressive solutions that meet or exceed their enterprises' information needs. Instead, these managers are dealing with smaller curative or preventive issues that won't go away, and which occupy altogether too much of their budget, and their resources' time.

The oldest (okay, maybe second oldest) service-type business proposition in the world goes something like this: If I can make (or save) you $50, will you pay me $5? In IT, such a proposition speaks to both return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO): you make back the money you invest in the service, and you save on the cost of operating the system.

That's the promise of APOS well managed BI solutions. You conserve the time of your resources, and you can move away from fixing and preventing problems, and toward providing progressive business intelligence solutions for your information consumers.

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