Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

The opening portion of the keynote was a dramatic (perhaps overly dramatic?) introduction by Gabriel Byrne of Usual Suspects fame (among others). His talk was interesting but what I liked the best was his update on Einstein’s famous formula. It looked like this:

e = mc(imc)2

In this formula, “m” stands for mobile, “c” stands for cloud, and “imc” is short for in memory computing. The concept is simple. By leveraging the power of in memory analytics, we can set up information resources in the cloud that are consumed by mobile devices. The three technologies individually are strong, but together they become greater than the sum of the parts. One of the primary restrictions about mobile devices is their relative lack of computing power. (Later in the keynote one panel member observed that today’s smartphones do, however, have more computing power than the systems NASA used in the 60’s to land man on the moon. Can you imagine piloting your lunar lander with your iPhone? Wonder if AT&T has cell coverage on the moon…) Because of the lack of computing power, mobile devices are mostly consumption portals rather than calculation engines. That’s where in memory comes into play. By pushing the analytics back onto the server and hosting them in memory, a mobile device doesn’t have to be brawny, it just needs enough brains to connect and render.

Putting the systems into the cloud just ads ubiquity to the system. It’s no longer behind a corporate firewall, it’s available to anyone in your enterprise, no matter where they are. It’s a compelling vision.

The keynote was followed by a discussion panel which was both entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. It was more about where we will all be in 30 years than the more immediate concerns of in memory computing. I will post more on the panel discussion later today. If you can, try seeing if the session was recorded and can be played back online. It’s worth watching.

The conference is starting out well. My flight was uneventful, although I had forgotten the average age for passengers on flights to Orlando is substantially lower than other flights. I wonder why that is? I managed to connect with a couple of friends and have some fun a Universal Studios. But that was yesterday, and this morning I am sitting in the general session getting ready to take in the keynote. I’m always intrigued by how many folks sitting around me seem to be so focused on “live blogging” or tweeting that they miss out on some of the keynote. Some folks seem to be so busy writing about what was talked about a few minutes ago that they miss what’s going on right now.

I hope to be doing my own version of “semi-delayed blogging” throughout the day today. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot about the fruits of the Sybase acquisition this year, as mobility seems to be one of the hot topics. I’ll share the main points of the keynote shortly.

After it’s over.

In a recent tweet I shared a short story (it’s on twitter, it has to be short!) about something I witnessed earlier today. I was in our break-room getting ready to eat lunch. I was waiting in line for my turn at the microwave when a person walked into the room, grabbed a cup, and filled it with ice from the ice-maker. That’s not so unusual. What caught my interest was what they did after that. They went to the coffer maker where there is a hot water spigot (for making soups or hot chocolate) and proceeded to cover the ice with super-heated water.

I was first amused as I thought to myself, “What’s the point?”

Immediately upon asking myself that question, I was reminded of a number of different BI solutions that I have been asked to deliver over the years. So many times I have been asked to provide a [report|database|reporting system|universe] that “includes everything” so that the business user can pick out what they’re interested in. Large reports or universes seldom reach critical penetration in the business simply because they try to do too much. If you want ice, get some ice. If you want hot water, get some hot water. But when you try to do both at the same time, you get neither. The result is simply a lukewarm puddle.

I’ve already tweeted and posted about this on BOB, but in case you don’t check either of those two venues, ASUG has opened a new site to collect abstract submissions for the fall Business Objects conference.

http://callforpresentations.asug.com/

There was a question about the deadline for getting submissions in, and I will find that out and share it.

The event will be hosted once again at the Dolphin and Swan resorts at Walt Disney World. I really enjoyed my time there last year and am looking forward to another successful conference. Of course the success of the conference depends largely on the content, and the content is provided by the community. If you have a success story, please share. If you have a failure story, feel free to share that too. People like hearing both sides of a project.

Werner Daehn has started a topic on BOB that I have found very interesting… he has suggested that we do a series of sessions that will be a “soup to nuts” representation of a data warehouse implementation. Werner wrote:

Who wants to submit an abstractor as part of a consecutive series of “How to build a DWH” lectures?

I would come up with a nice source system and convert that into a Data Warehouse Star Schema in e.g. SQL Server database I provide to you. And then based on that Star Schema we can do our lectures with the different products.

The advantage would be that people who know one area, like Universe Designer, would see what can be done in other areas, e.g. what can be done in the ETL layer, the data modeler person will see the challenges an XCelsius developer has with a simple Star Schema. Simply provide the opportunity to “watch” the creation of an entire DWH within a couple of hours and attend the parts you are interested in.

If you’re interested, please log on to BOB and post your input in the topic.

See you in Orlando!

Related Links

• Soup to Nuts definition on Wikipedia
• SBOUC Call for Papers

I was not sure if I was going to be able to make it to SAPPHIRE this May, but it appears that I will be going. At least that’s the current plan.

For those of you waiting anxiously for details about the SAP BusinessObjects User Conference (aka SBOUC) I can tell you that things are moving forward behind the scenes, and that the call for papers dates should be announced soon. It looks like we’ll have about six weeks to get our abstracts ready. If you want to have some input on some of the possible categories, feel free to post suggestions in the comments. The process of getting those categories selected is going on right now. Some of you may even have received a survey from ASUG looking for your input. Even if you didn’t get the survey, you can pass your ideas on to me. I’ll do my best to get them to the right people.

Network access has been sporadic at times so I’m going to post a few random observations from the morning sessions…

They showed BI content on lots of different mobile devices, including the Blackberry Torch, the Blackberry pad, and the Samsung Galaxy. Not much depth shown but we saw live content on all three. The most interesting mobile surprise to me was showing Web Intelligence on the iPad including gesture support.

One comment that I have heard more than once but without a lot of demonstration support is the “suite” concept. They have reviewed and redone the interface on Crystal and Web Intelligence so they look more like tools froomthe same vendor. Think of the Microsoft Office toolbar concept.

Ramp up continues, with rumors of GA by May. Just in time for the annual conference.

They’re showing Webi on an iPad! Native reports distributed and interactive on the pad.

They also had a “save the tie” contest run via twitter, which will help some of the recent tweets make more sense.

SAP seems to be more interested in the “little guy” this year. Yesterday we got confirmation that EDGE 4.0 release is coming. Today we heard that they are licensing their pre-built analytic apps for the same customers. They’re even setting up their HANA systems in an “extra small” configuration so that technology can start to trickle down.

One comment that surprised me this morning was related to the analytic apps. The SAP guy said that they were surprised to find out that customers were already customizing their apps rather than using them out of the box. Of course they’re going to customize them! Everybody thinks their business is unique. What competitive advantage are they going to get from using the same system as everybody else?

I was able to crash a session for bloggers this afternoon (actually I was invited, but it sounds more fun to say I crashed the party). We had two hours to talk about everything coming in 4.0.

It wasn’t nearly enough time.

One interesting tidbit that came out of the meeting: there are over one million person-hours of effort into the 4.0 release! That’s a bunch of hours. Normally SAP would try to do a major release on an 18 month schedule, or in that ballpark at any rate. The 4.0 release has been in the works for almost twice that long.

What does that mean? It means there is a lot to talk about. However, I’ll try to summarize a few bullets for now and save more for the main event tomorrow.

First, every aspect of the suite has been touched. That means from the data collection / integration / cleansing all the way through to presentation and reporting. Anyone that is interested (as I am) in the semantic layer would of course know about the new IDT or Information Design Tool. We spent only a few minutes on that too this afternoon, and it’s one of the major components that got updated in this release.

We talked a bit about HANA, and how it will eventually be used not only to support in-memory analytics, but in-memory anything.

We talked about event-driven BI. In fact tomorrow we’re going to hear a customer success story about how a major railroad company is looking to use this technology to take the next step beyond their current BI.

We heard that Netweaver is not going away, and we also heard that there will be an EDGE release of the 4.0 platform coming.

Someone mentioned to me that the 4.0 release seemed to be “primarily for SAP customers.” That came up today, and the response was that over 90% of the enhancements in the products would be immediately usable by anyone, no matter what their environment happened to be. I don’t have a list but I don’t have a problem believing that statistic.

We saw more evidence that Web Intelligence (as well as the new semantic layer) now supports dimension data natively, rather than requiring any number of alternate solutions that have been used by various folks over the past few years.

We heard that there are around 30 customers participating in the 4.0 “ramp up” process, meaning they have 4.0 either deployed in production or are ready to do so. This came out after one of the bloggers asked how to respond to customers that say, “Skip 4.0, wait for 4.1.”

After our meeting we went to a reception. When that was done, several of us walked to Roxy’s Deli and had dessert. I had cheesecake. It’s New York City, I have to eat cheesecake, right? I first discovered this place (they’re right on Times Square) when I was working for a client several years ago. I have been working my way through their cheesecake varieties ever since! Tonight I had triple chocolate brownie cheesecake. It was good, but not in my top two favorites. The deli itself is quite expensive, so I generally only get dessert. It’s plenty.

Tomorrow is a full day. We’re told that there are over 500 people in attendance physically here at the hotel, and another 6,000 registered to attend virtually. I will try to do live blogs from the floor of the event, but I’m not yet sure how the connectivity will be set up. At the very least I will post more when I get home.

I’m heading off to New York City for the SAP Run Better Tour and BI4 launch. I expect the next two days to be exciting… And full. It started when my alarm clock went off at 4am this morning, which explains the title of this blog post. Right now it feels witty. When I wake up later, perhaps not so much.

I hope to do some live (or at least semi-live) blogging during the event. I will tweeting to some of the others at the event since we probably don’t need 50 people saying the same thing in small chunks.

Back in a few hours. After I get some sleep on the plane.