Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

So far at the conference there has not been any official announcement as to when BI 4.0 will be formally released, at least not that I have heard. I would have expected them to make a big deal out of it if they were releasing it so I don’t think I’ve missed anything.

Yesterday I attended an influence council meeting on the semantic layer. The audience was somewhat sparse for something I consider to be relatively important. Derek kicked off the meeting with an introduction of what the influence council was about, and then Pierpaolo took over and drove through various demonstrations and talked about the future of the semantic layer. I gave them a whole laundry list of improvements to make to prompts.

After that I had some small meetings with various SAP representatives and other bloggers. One of the interesting remarks that came out of one of those meetings was that SAP had completely missed the mark on Android support. Of course everyone knows about the iPhone and iPad; they’re everywhere here. The Blackberry Playbook is also very visible. Both devices were used in the keynote this morning (blog post to follow on that shortly). But the comment that was made yesterday was interesting. It seems that more and more companies are having to deal with employees that want to use only one device. They don’t want a company mobile and a personal mobile, and companies are happy to subsidize a personal mobile for corporate use as they don’t have to track assets and manage upgrades and everything else that goes along with procuring hardware. By most accounts, Android phones now make up a third or more of the mobile operating environment. That means that yes, Android is making inroads into the corporate market. It’s all being driven by corporate acceptance (and support) of personal devices.

And that means yes, SAP has Android on the horizon. I’m attending a private briefing on mobile later today and will share what I am allowed to share.

Another interesting discussion I was able to participate in was related to how to address offline mode for mobile devices. How can I leverage my iPad on an airplane, for example? Can I download a Web Intelligence report and drill down through the local cube? How much data can I cache? One of the interesting distinctions made was that authored content (meaning IT or departmental generated canned reports) are good candidates for offline consumption, but self-service (ad hoc) content should really be limited to online only. I am not sure I agree with that, so I am going to think about it some more. I think that Web Intelligence (which looks absolutely awesome on the iPad, by the way) bridges the gap between authored (published) and self-service information, and that makes the answer to this question a bit muddy in my mind.

Finally, another future (or perhaps now) big thing is the concept of operational or embedded BI. In a very simplistic world, we have operational systems (perhaps mobile) and we have reporting systems. The fact is we don’t live in a simplistic world. We can’t afford to. That means with near real-time instant responses possible with in-memory cloud systems serving our mobile devices (there, did I hit enough buzz-words for one post?) we can merge and embed our BI right into our operational systems. This isn’t a new concept, it’s just being packaged under a new heading I guess. There was a discussion about having “write back” capabilities in our BI systems. It’s not like we don’t have it today (well, Web Intelligence doesn’t have it… yet) it’s just out there under a different name.

Embedded BI would be very interesting, but as I said it’s not a new concept. It’s just being revived under a new name. The Ability to enable BI content inside applications whether custom or not would open some interesting doors. Take the glamor of BI and put on your steel toed boots. Let’s get to work.

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?