swot_saps_business_intellige_169453

Gartner for Business LeadersPublication Date: 2 October 2009 ID Number: G00169453

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SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence Platform, Worldwide Rita L. Sallam, Dan Sommer

The combination of SAP and Business Objects could realize synergies as a complete and optimized BI platform and enterprise applications stack with expanded global channels. But SAP must overcome post-acquisition customer malaise and challenges from emerging low-cost and easy to use alternatives.

Publication Date: 2 October 2009/ID Number: G00169453 of 31

© 2009 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction........................................................................................................................... 4

Strengths ................................................................................................................. 7 Most Frequently Deployed as an Enterprise BI Standard.......................... 7 History of Innovation Despite Size ............................................................. 8 Access to Untapped SAP Installed Base and Global Channels "Ecosystem" ............................................................................................... 9 Focus on Data Integration and Information Management........................ 10 Executing on Post-Acquisition Product Road Map................................... 10 Mature SMB strategy................................................................................ 11 Product Strengths..................................................................................... 11

Weaknesses .......................................................................................................... 14 Issues with Customer Experience Continue to Frustrate Customers ...... 14 No Enterprise, Packaged Analytic Applications for Non-SAP Customers15 Integration Effort Due to Numerous Acquisitions Still in Progress; Customers Will have to Migrate to Re-Architected Products ................... 15

Product Limitations ................................................................................................ 17 Opportunities ......................................................................................................... 21

Provide Tools and Guidance to Reduce Confusion in the SAP and Former Business Objects Installed Bases................................................ 21 Leveraging In-Memory Innovations to Enhance a Heterogeneous BI Platform ....................................................................................................21 Provide an Open, Non-SAP NetWeaver BW Option for Packaged Analytic Applications................................................................................. 22 Capitalize on Resurgence in Departmental and Workgroup BI By Leveraging Existing SMB Strategy........................................................... 22 Drive Mainstream Adoption of Predictive Analytics and Embedded BI.... 23 Leverage SAP's Complex Event Processing/Business Activity Monitoring Assets to Deliver Operational BI .............................................................. 23 Extend BI Platform to Support Collaborative Decision Making ................ 23 Become the Most Optimized BI Solution for SAP Environments ............. 24

Threats................................................................................................................... 24 Questions Around the Role of SAP NetWeaver BW Confuse Customers24 Customer Installed Base Reluctant to Do Major Upgrades...................... 25 The Emergence of Credible, Low-Cost Alternatives Threatens Momentum................................................................................................ 25 Like Other Megavendors, Competing as a Heterogeneous AND Stack Vendor Risks Stretching Resources......................................................... 27 Ad Hoc Query Usage Reaching Saturation; Expanded User Adoption Driven By Other User Paradigms ............................................................. 27

Implication for Company Being Profiled ............................................................................. 27 Company Overview ............................................................................................................ 28

Company Profile .................................................................................................... 28 Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 30

Recommended Reading.................................................................................................................. 30



LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform Product Strengths...................................................... 12 Table 2. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform — Product Limitations ............................................... 18 Table 3. SAP's BI Platform Revenue, 2007-2008 (Millions of Dollars) ........................................... 28 Table 4. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform Products..................................................................... 29

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Graphical Representation of SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence Platform, Worldwide .. 6 Figure 2. SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence Platform, Worldwide................................................. 7



ANALYSIS

Introduction The business intelligence (BI) platform market has undergone dramatic changes in the past five years. Driven by organizations' insatiable demand for better decisions as a top IT investment priority, the BI market has evolved in a similar fashion to the ERP market before it. From a vast array of individual point solutions addressing specific areas of the BI platform, the BI market coalesced into a few key vendors (including Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion) that either built or acquired a broader set of BI platform, performance management and data integration components. These vendors then replaced their disparate product sets by re-architecting them into more cohesive, integrated platforms. Early in 2008, in a major consolidation phase in this process, megavendors Oracle, IBM and SAP took ownership of a majority share of the BI platforms market, by acquiring leading BI platform vendors Hyperion, Cognos and BusinessObjects, respectively. Only megavendor Microsoft pursued BI market traction, through largely organic product development with minor "tuck in" acquisitions and a low-price bundling strategy that coupled BI platform components with SQL Server, Microsoft's database platform, and more recently with its widely deployed SharePoint Server. The megavendors' growth strategy appears to have paid off. In 2008, the overall BI market grew by 20%, far greater than expected, with incremental market growth in dollars — specifically, 83% of it — largely attributed to the megavendors. Application stack vendors (SAP and Oracle) benefited disproportionately by selling into their installed bases (see "Market Trends: Business Intelligence, Worldwide, 2009").

BusinessObjects was the original inventor of the business semantic layer designed to make BI more pervasive by abstracting the complexities of the underlying data from the business user. BusinessObjects was acquired by SAP after it grew through acquisition into the largest independent BI platform vendor. At the time of the acquisition, BusinessObjects had one of the broadest set of capabilities extending from data integration and data quality, and encompassing most core elements of a BI platform (except for predictive analytics), as well as performance management and corporate performance management applications. BusinessObjects not only extended its core BI platform capabilities through acquisition (for example, Crystal for reporting), it leveraged its acquisition strategy into market innovations in the areas of Flash-based visualizations (Infommersion), BI and search, unstructured data and the integration of text mining and analytics (Inxight), and software as a service (SaaS) (Nsite).

The new, combined SAP BusinessObjects portfolio has the potential to realize significant product and go-to-market synergies as a complete and optimized BI platform and enterprise applications stack with expanded global channels. SAP's ERP customers have long been frustrated with the lack of best-of-breed functionality, inadequate support for non-SAP systems, poor scalability, and the sub-par usability of SAP's NetWeaver Business Explorer (BEx) tools. These customers incur additional license fees for SAP BusinessObjects' BI tools, such as Web Intelligence, Explorer, Xcelsius and infrastructure components such as the Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). These incremental costs have caused much angst in SAP's installed base, but the incremental revenue has proved quite beneficial to SAP, as BI provides an avenue for growth as sales of its core applications stagnate. Once the SAP BusinessObjects integration road map is complete, SAP applications customers should benefit from a much improved and more heterogeneous BI platform that will also be optimized for SAP applications. At the same time, the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio now has access to SAP's expanded global channels, and is at an advantage relative to competing vendors in the largely untapped SAP installed base. Despite the significant cross-selling opportunities and channel access, the acquisition has not been without its challenges. Product duplication and compatibility issues between the SAP BusinessObjects and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) platforms are being resolved according to a product



road map during the next 12 months, with additional features and optimization planned for 2012. This lengthy road map has raised questions in the SAP installed base about the role of SAP NetWeaver BW, and when (or if) they should migrate to SAP BusinessObjects' BI solutions; or whether they should consider third-party tools that currently provide better support for SAP NetWeaver BW. Moreover, increased SAP support pricing, problems with BusinessObjects' support both before and after the switch-over to SAP, a change in the SAP BusinessObjects pricing model (bringing it more into line with SAP), and vastly different business practices between SAP and BusinessObjects, have led to differently rooted apprehensions in both the SAP and BusinessObjects installed bases (see "SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence: Customers at a Crossroads").

SAP also faces a number of new market dynamics that could inhibit its long-term market opportunity:

1. After years of BI deployments, according to Gartner's BI platform user wants and needs survey, there is only an estimated 20% adoption rate among users. Emerging data discovery and analysis tools deploying disruptive in-memory and advanced visualization technologies into business user offerings are addressing the problem of making BI easier to deploy and consume. These tools are filling a gap left wide open when the major BI platform vendors, including SAP, moved from personal and departmental products to enterprise BI platforms (although SAP recently introduced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to address this need).

2. A tough macroeconomic environment that is putting pressure on enterprise deployments at a time when high-priced, monolithic, BI platform incumbents are facing increasing challenges from perceived low-cost alternatives, including Microsoft, open-source software and departmental options.

As SAP is one of the leading BI platform megavendors, this research note offers CIOs and BI leaders a "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats" (SWOT) framework for assessing SAP's BI platform and related offerings.

Figure 1 is a graphical representation of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats pertaining to SAP's BI platform, based on Gartner's SWOT rating model. Figure 2 is a summary of our SWOT.



Figure 1. Graphical Representation of SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence Platform, Worldwide

SSWW

OO TT

SSWW

OO TT

Source: Gartner (September 2009)



Figure 2. SWOT: SAP's Business Intelligence Platform, Worldwide

Strengths Weaknesses

• Most frequently deployed as an enterprise BI standard

• History of innovation despite size

• Access to untapped SAP installed base and global channels "ecosystem"

• Focus on data integration and information management

• Executing on post-acquisition product road map

• Mature SMB strategy

• Product strengths: production reporting, ad hoc reporting, BI search data discovery, mobile

• Issues with customer experience continue to frustrate customers

• No enterprise, packaged analytic applications for non-SAP customers

• Integration effort due to numerous acquisitions still in progress; customers will have to migrate to re-architected products

• Product limitations: OLAP, in-platform data federation, no unified front-end architecture, semantic layer support for multi-dimensional concepts, predictive analytics

Opportunities Threats

• Provide tools and guidance to reduce confusion in the SAP and former BusinessObjectsinstalled bases

• Leveraging in-memory innovations to enhance a heterogeneous BI platform

• Provide an open, non-SAP NetWeaver BW option for packaged analytic applications

• Capitalize on resurgence in departmental and workgroup BI by expanding SMB strategy, SaaS, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

• Drive mainstream adoption of predictive analytics and embedded BI

• Leverage SAP's complex event processing/BAM assets to deliver operational BI

• Extend BI platform to support collaborative decision making

• Become the most optimized BI solution for SAP environments

• Questions around the role of SAP NetWeaverBW confuse customers

• Customer installed base reluctant to do major upgrades

• The emergence of credible, low-cost alternatives threatens momentum

• Like other megavendors, competing as a heterogeneous AND stack vendor risks stretching resources

• Ad-hoc query usage reaching saturation; expanded user adoption driven by other user paradigms

Strengths Weaknesses
































































BAM = business activity monitoring, BI = business intelligence, BW = Business Warehouse, OLAP = online analytical processing, SaaS = software as a service, SMB = small or midsize business Source: Gartner (September 2009)

Strengths

Most Frequently Deployed as an Enterprise BI Standard

SAP (and previously BusinessObjects) has been a long-time fixture in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's BI platforms Magic Quadrant, both as the once-largest independent BI platform vendor



and now as part of SAP. SAP was one of the first BI vendors to begin executing on a vision to broaden the BI platform beyond traditional capabilities to include data integration and performance management. It also made early efforts to integrate its diverse BI components into a unified, common BI foundation in support of enterprise deployments, giving organizations options to move away from prevailing departmental BI strategies. SAP's strategy continues to pay dividends. According to Gartner's 2009 BI platform user survey, SAP BusinessObjects, more than any other vendor, is considered an enterprise standard. Its customers also view its prospects as a future BI vendor positively, even more so than their current experience with its products (see "BI Platforms User Survey: How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendors"). Moreover, SAP finds itself with enormous cross-selling potential, not only between the traditional BusinessObjects and SAP NetWeaver BW customer bases, but also selling BI to SAP's application customers.

History of Innovation Despite Size

SAP's (and previously Business Objects') acquisition strategy was not only targeted at core platform components. Despite its large size and the need to integrate a number of acquisitions (Acta, Crystal Decisions, SRC, Infommersion, Cartesis, OutlookSoft and Inxight), SAP has continued to drive innovation in the BI market, leveraging its acquisition assets as well as internal development. Key areas where SAP (and before it Business Objects) introduced innovation into the BI market include:

Visualizations: BusinessObjects was one of the first major BI platform vendors to introduce unique visualizations, such as gauges and sliders into dashboards, making them more attractive to and consumable by the average business user. Arguably one of the highest return on investment (ROI) acquisitions in the history of the BI market, BusinessObjects' acquisition of Infommersion introduced Flash dashboards (Xcelsius) into the boardroom and into the lexicon of the mainstream BI platform market, forcing the rest of the market to follow suit with similar Flash-based dashboard offerings. The SAP BusinessObjects' road map suggests that it is continuing to invest in visualizations. Overhauling the charting library and patenting algorithms for automatically recommending the best visualizations for specific data are a couple of examples of such investments. Gartner would like to see SAP continue to innovate in this area by incorporating advanced interactive visualizations (such as those included with Tableau and Tibco Spotfire) into its end-user tools, enabling Xcelsius users to perform drill-down analysis. Today, Xcelsius, due to its Flash-based architecture, is limited to providing interactive dashboards with summary data.

In-memory technology: With the introduction of Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA), now called Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA), SAP was early in applying in-memory technology to improve BI application performance. Because SAP badly needed a solution to the perennially poor performance of SAP NetWeaver BW, one could cynically claim that necessity was the mother of invention for BWA. Regardless of the nexus, in-memory at SAP has evolved beyond its original purpose to become a core part of SAP's product strategy. By the end of 2009, SAP is expected to introduce an open, non-SAP NetWeaver BW version of BWA, supporting the indexing of multiple data sources with data federation as a key component. SAP is also developing ways to leverage its in-memory technology assets into its applications product strategy. According to SAP, the database market opportunity represents one third of the revenue of an application sale. SAP is hoping to keep some of that with its in-memory strategy.

Unstructured data access, text analytics and BI and search: The acquisition of Inxight's federated search and text analytics capabilities quickly deepened BusinessObjects' commitment to extending BI to unstructured data. Not only is this acquisition a component of SAP's search-based product SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, its text analytics capabilities allow users to not only access unstructured data but to mine that data, analyze it for attributes like sentiment, and then aggregate, classify and visualize that information with structured data. The recently rebranded SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (formerly Polestar) has enormous potential to drive BI



user adoption to a much broader class of users. However, to date there are just a handful of customers using the technology, in limited production rollouts.

SaaS/OnDemand: Business Objects was the first major BI platform vendor to introduce a BI SaaS offering with the introduction of crystalreports.com in 2006. It has since expanded its SaaS offerings to include SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand and SAP BusinessObjects Information OnDemand. BI OnDemand includes a hosted data warehouse, crystalreports.com for report and dashboard sharing, and the on-demand capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. SAP BusinessObjects Information OnDemand is an online portal with prebuilt, customizable reports that let users compare data with external market and financial data. These offerings are designed to support a broad range of deployment options. There is also a free, personal version of crystalreports.com. Departments with limited production reporting requirements with limited users are supported by another tier of service. Service options are also available for large enterprises that need to support multiple data sources with a combination of on- and off-premises reporting, ad hoc and dashboarding needs.

For example, ADP has more than 1,700 sales managers, representatives and project managers using the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand offerings to support sales pipeline management and sales mentoring programs. Originally the company had more than 8,000 different sales reports that made it difficult to measure sales rep. productivity and to clearly understand pipeline status. Today, ADP has standardized reports and dashboards that highlight the latest data across all the sales teams. In addition to saving time for field sales leaders and project managers, ADP has experienced a 10% improvement in team member coverage, as well as a 15% improvement in data quality.

RapidAdvance, a provider of business cash advance services for small or midsize businesses (SMBs), is also using the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand offerings to improve client support and satisfaction, by ensuring that each customer has the latest account information. Each day, RapidAdvance runs over 700 reports for its clients, and has automated the updating, sharing and distribution of these reports, ensuring secure delivery of information to its customers.

While SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand demonstrates innovation, SAP faces a big challenge in convincing third-party information aggregators to become part of the BI OnDemand portfolio. There is little value-add to end customers having a consolidated portal of disparate information services. While Gartner believes that there is huge potential in combining industry-specific information with BI and data warehousing best practices to deliver analytic applications via SaaS (see "Industry Analytic Services"), SAP BusinessObjects is unlikely to convince major information aggregators to contribute content to the offering. It will put limits on their pricing and licensing and the direct relationship with their customers, for no tangible benefit. Customers are just as likely to subscribe to analytic applications directly from an information analytic service provider as they are to go through SAP.

Access to Untapped SAP Installed Base and Global Channels "Ecosystem"

Despite product duplication, the raison d'etre for the acquisition of BusinessObjects by SAP is highly complementary. While many SAP application customers have deployed the bundled-for-free BI capabilities in SAP NetWeaver BW (aka SAP NetWeaver BI), these capabilities are generally viewed as less functional, harder to use and less scalable than best-in-class BI platforms such as BusinessObjects. The SAP application installed base, frustrated at SAP's previous attempts to evolve SAP NetWeaver BI into a leading solution, now represents a significant untapped and underserved market for SAP BusinessObjects software, particularly once the integration road map is complete and SAP can demonstrate strong references for SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions running against SAP NetWeaver BW. Even though BusinessObjects was the largest independent BI platform vendor, its go-to-market resources



were dwarfed by SAP's global sales channels, including its industry expertise, which are now at its disposal.

The acquisition appears to be bearing fruit. According to Gartner (see "Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2008"), the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio experienced higher growth in 2008 than in any other year in its history, driving 14% of the 20% growth that SAP saw in software and services revenue. This growth is even more impressive when you consider that SAP's adoption of BusinessObjects as a BI platform is in the early stages of penetration, as many of SAP's installed base customers have delayed purchases as they weigh their future options while the road map matures.

Focus on Data Integration and Information Management

Prior to being acquired by SAP, Business Objects was one of the first major BI platform vendors to expand beyond the core BI platform with a comprehensive data integration strategy. Through acquisition, Business Objects pulled together a broad range of information management components, including data quality, data lineage, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) and data federation, and it is executing on a road map to integrate these components with the SAP BusinessObjects platform, and with each other. It acquired Acta (ETL), Medience (data federation) and leading data quality vendor Firstlogic to create a comprehensive data integration portfolio and vision that has pushed SAP into the Leaders quadrant of both the Gartner Data Integration Tools Magic Quadrant and the Data Quality Magic Quadrant. SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator, which includes data lineage and impact analysis, will be the basis for enhancing SAP NetWeaver BW to make it easier to integrate non-SAP data sources.

The SAP BusinessObjects BI platform offers one of the more fully featured data lineage capabilities and impact analysis for both business and IT users, regardless of the ETL used. Metadata Manager lets users view and analyze the integrated metadata from multiple sources and ETL tools to get information on data usage, end-to-end change impact analysis and report-to-source data lineage. Business users are able to query metadata information to determine what data and reports are available in the analytics environment. Within the Web Intelligence context panel, users can know where data was sourced and the rules for how it was combined with other data into the analytic environment. In the Java applet interface, users can hover over objects to see the metadata while dragging and dropping the objects into the query panel (this is not available in report design mode). The definitions that users can see in this interface when hovering over an object do not rely on SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator. The Dynamic HTML viewer populates data automatically from the universe, providing data lineage from any ETL tool. There is a context panel on the left side of the report that shows the metadata. Metadata Manager accesses and administers all the corporate metadata to allow this lineage (including metadata produced by third-party ETL vendors like Informatica). Within Crystal Reports, if the report is based on a universe, data lineage is also available in the context panel.

Data lineage against SAP NetWeaver BW data sources, available as of August 2009, advances the integration of the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform with SAP NetWeaver BW.

Executing on Post-Acquisition Product Road Map

The acquisition of Business Objects reversed SAP's long-standing organic growth and "tuck-in gap-fill" product strategy. The sheer size and scope of the BusinessObjects acquisition, for even the most experienced acquirer, compounded by significant duplication between the SAP BEx and Business Objects product lines, represented an unknown integration risk to SAP and BusinessObjects customers. To its credit, at the risk of loss of interim revenue, SAP was quick to communicate tough product rationalization choices in a comprehensive integration road map, and has been executing on the timelines and milestones.



Mature SMB strategy

SAP was early to respond to Microsoft's strategy to penetrate the small to midsize market as a wedge to expand into the enterprise. Beyond the introduction of crystalreports.com, it was one of the first major BI platform vendors to introduce SMB versions of its enterprise offerings, Crystal Reports Server and SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence, as part of an overall SMB-oriented go-to-market strategy. To address personal BI needs, both Xcelsius and the Web Intelligence Rich Client can now be purchased as stand-alone tools, without the requirement of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise or Edge. Moreover, SAP recently added SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to its SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI solutions, to deliver an easy to use data exploration interface to casual users.

An early and well developed SaaS strategy is another strength in SAP's mid-market approach. As mentioned previously in the section about innovation, Business Objects was the first major BI platform vendor to make a significant foray into SaaS for BI, with its SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand products. None of the major BI platform vendors has a significant presence with BI as a service offering in the market, nor are they expected to in the near future.

Product Strengths

From a product perspective, the SAP BusinessObjects' BI platform delivers above average functionality across most BI platform components except for online analytical processing (OLAP), dashboarding and predictive analytics and data mining, with strong capabilities in production reporting and ad hoc reporting (see "BI Platforms User Survey: How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendors"). Ad hoc reporting is SAP BusinessObjects' "sweet spot," and accounts for a large percentage of analytic activities undertaken by SAP BusinessObjects BI users (42% do static reporting, 42% parameterized reporting, 9% dashboards, 25% simple ad hoc, 12% moderate ad hoc and 10% complex ad hoc). SAP BusinessObjects' self-service authoring paradigm enables end users to build ad hoc reports with strong formatting capabilities against the platform's semantic layer, which hides the complexity of the underlying data from the user.

"Best fit" SAP BusinessObjects BI platform organizations will be looking for an enterprise BI standard with comprehensive BI and data integration capabilities that is particularly well suited to run against an enterprise data warehouse in a heterogeneous, global environment. They will place a high value on self-service BI with critical requirements for traditional ad hoc reporting. SAP application customers with these requirements should reap additional stack benefits once the integration road map is complete and the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform is better optimized to run against SAP NetWeaver BW.

Table 1 provides further details of the capabilities in each component.



Table 1. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform Product Strengths

Capability/SAP BusinessObjects Product(s)

Comments

Reporting Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has been a long-time reporting standard in many organizations. It is a mature and fully featured production reporting tool with a rich desktop authoring environment. Crystal Reports is mostly targeted at enterprisewide reporting solutions developed by IT and often embedded in other applications. Crystal Reports is offered via a variety of deployment models to meet the reporting needs of individuals, workgroups or enterprises: (1) as a component of SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise (2) as part of a departmental server, Crystal Reports Server, and (3) via an OnDemand offering, crystalreports.com. Although still more code-centric than many other leading production reporting tools (for example, IBM Cognos Report Studio, Information Builders and MicroStrategy) (see "Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence Reporting"), Crystal Reports 2008 features a number of usability and interactivity enhancements, including integration with SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise Flashed-based components, to support "what if" analysis within a Crystal Report.

Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence — for the Business Analyst SAP BusinessObjects — For the Casual User

Web Intelligence: Ranked "above average" in terms of ad hoc reporting and analysis in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant user survey, SAP BusinessObjects was an early innovator in delivering ad hoc reporting capabilities to the business analyst. Its flagship ad hoc reporting product, Desktop Intelligence, and now the ongoing Web-based version, Web Intelligence, enable analysts to ask their own questions of the data without relying on IT to create a report. Web Intelligence users access the SAP BusinessObjects semantic layer, Universes, rather than the underlying data tables directly, to insulate them from the complexity of the underlying data and to allow them to easily navigate available data sources. SAP BusinessObjects' microcube capabilities provide extensive report caching that affords end users an exceptional level of on-report analysis and interactivity through filtering, prompting and drilling, without having to requery the database. Web Intelligence Interactive, previously an optional component of the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform, further enables a report recipient to customize analysis by switching dimensions and measures, adding columns, doing basic calculations and so on. In the new SAP BusinessObjects pricing model, introduced in April 2009 (see "Q&A: What SAP BusinessObjects' Revamped Pricing Means to You"), accessing Web Intelligence Interactive capabilities requires the licensing of the more expensive Design and Analyze tier (role). Web Intelligence also provides extensive formatting capabilities. So much so that they overlap quite a bit with those offered in Crystal Reports. As a result, many organizations find they can meet their ad hoc analysis and reporting requirements with a single tool, Web Intelligence, without also having to implement Crystal Reports. While Web Intelligence can access multidimensional and relational data sources, it is not a fully featured OLAP viewer. This is in part due to the limited support for multidimensional concepts of the universe itself through which Web Intelligence must access its data sources, as well as the limitation in data size (2 gigabytes [GB]) that the SAP BusinessObjects microcube technology can process in memory. (Today, there is a limitation of 2 GB for a server process — which supports over 25 million cells. This is linked to the 32-bit architecture. SAP plans to introduce 64-bit support in 2010, whereby the server's physical memory size will be increased. Additionally, in 2010 there are plans for Web Intelligence to support non-flattened retrieval of multidimensional content, which will reduce the volume of data that Web Intelligence retrieves). SAP BusinessObjects has introduced Voyager for this purpose, and will combine Voyager with BEx Analyzer into a new, more fully featured OLAP analysis product, Pioneer, for ad hoc analysis in a future release. However, front-end OLAP analysis is a major gap in the otherwise crowded SAP toolbelt. There has been




Comments

limited adoption of Voyager as most customers are waiting for the updated release. Moreover, while the desktop client product, Desktop Intelligence, has supported disconnected access, equivalent (to Desktop Intelligence) disconnected analysis support was added to Web Intelligence in SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.0. In future releases, as defined by the SAP road map, there are plans for Web Intelligence to support multidimensional concepts through an enhanced semantic layer that will improve its ability to query and interact with multidimensional data, as well as provide consistent experience with new capabilities for relational sources. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer — while Web Intelligence reports may be accessed by report consumers or casual business users, report authoring in Web Intelligence is typically done by trained business analysts or report developers, depending on the complexity of the analysis required. To address the analytical needs of casual business users, SAP introduced Polestar, now rebranded as SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a BI and search interface for data exploration for casual users. SAP, along with Information Builders with Magnify, IBM Cognos with Go Search and Fast (acquired by Microsoft), have all been early innovators in combining BI and search to put search-based data discovery and analysis capabilities in the hands of a broader range of users. However, there has been very limited adoption of this technology to date. Casual business users can access and explore information directly without the assistance of IT or business analysts and without the need to build a traditional OLAP model where the questions need to be known in advance. When more in-depth analysis is required, Explorer's integration with the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform and metadata allows users to share insights with others via a URL embedded in an e-mail link. There is also a bookmark function. When further analysis is required, a user can export Explorer analysis to Excel or to Web Intelligence. Explorer generates queries from an index of structured (including SAP BusinessObjects metadata) and unstructured data based on key words, and returns back the most relevant information based on frequency of key words or hits. It then automatically generates the chart that best represents the information. Users can then filter, interact and display information visually. Indexing data in Explorer may take time, particularly for large data sets, although users may schedule this indexing in off-peak hours. Currently, there are two versions of Explorer: (1) the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer accelerated version for SAP NetWeaver BW, which leverages the BW Accelerator for improved performance and indexing of BW InfoCube data, giving SAP NetWeaver BW customers an easy to use interface for navigating and analyzing SAP NetWeaver BW data; and (2) SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, which accesses and indexes universes directly and enhances the universe with additional semantic descriptors. A non-SAP NetWeaver BW version of Explorer against BW Accelerator is on the road map and should allow for strong performance on large heterogeneous data sets (see "SAP Launches SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to Drive BI Adoption"). Not coincidentally, the user experience in Explorer is very similar to QlikView. The item selection area is reminiscent of the list boxes in QlikView, while the visualizations are similar to QlikView's chart objects. However, the similarities end there. Unlike in QlikView, pivoting in the table view and more advanced analysis, including custom calculations, are not possible in Explorer. This would require an export to Web Intelligence for further analysis. SAP's stated product direction is to use Explorer to serve the vast majority of casual users who do not yet use BI tools due to their complexity. Ultimately, however, if Explorer functionality is enhanced to support more complex analysis that leads to an overlap between Web Intelligence, Explorer and the new Pioneer, given Explorer's ease of use, Gartner believes that Explorer will likely replace Web Intelligence and




Comments

Voyager/Pioneer for an increasing number of user scenarios.

SAP BusinessObjects Mobile

Although Gartner has not seen many production deployments to date, Business Objects was one of the first major BI platform vendors (now joined by MicroStrategy) to release comprehensive mobile capabilities, which enable report authoring and extensive interactivity from a range of mobile devices, without the requirement for a separate server or the need to rewrite reports.

OLAP = online analytical processing Source: Gartner (September 2009)

Weaknesses

Issues with Customer Experience Continue to Frustrate Customers

Business Objects has historically had challenges with its support function. These challenges became particularly evident and acute for customers migrating from BusinessObjects 6.5 to BusinessObjects XI. With additional focus by Business Objects, and as more companies made the tough migration to XI, the most serious support issues appeared to be resolved, until post-acquisition, when the company switched over to SAP support in July 2008. The changeover did not go well, resulting in many lost logged support requests. Customers reported to Gartner that support requests that were not lost were often handled by unknowledgeable customer support reps., leading to multiple layers of escalation before an issue was resolved. Compounding the level of service issues, post-acquisition SAP changed its support model and increased pricing to 22%, with existing Business Objects customers facing phased increases while experiencing unsatisfactory service levels. SAP has resolved the most egregious issues related to the crossover and is executing on a plan to improve. Moreover, in conjunction with its customer satisfaction program, SAP support is establishing a program to further capture, measure, manage and enhance customers' experience with the SAP support function.

In its defense it must be noted that, with the exception of Microsoft, megavendor customers rate the support they've received lower than that of pure-play firms' customers. However, that does not make it less of an issue when organizations are considering which vendor to select as a BI standard.

Based on satisfaction trend scores presented to Gartner, SAP's efforts to improve support appear to be bearing fruit. However, former customers in particular continue to express overall dissatisfaction with their SAP relationship since the acquisition. Beyond support, typical complaints center around difficulties in the sales relationship since the acquisition, and frustration with pricing and contracting. These concerns are not unjustified, as existing SAP BusinessObjects portfolio customers have been faced with an increase of as much as 25% in list prices since 2007 (even after currency adjustments and regional uplifts), and now must sort through a completely revamped SAP BusinessObjects pricing model, which brings the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio more in line with SAP pricing. SAP BusinessObjects' portfolio customers must still assess whether or not the new pricing model gives them net cost and functional advantages (see "Q&A: What SAP BusinessObjects' Revamped Pricing Means to You"). Gartner has also received reports regarding inconsistencies in the pricing and auditing of instances hosted on virtual machines, particularly for older Business Objects contracts.



No Enterprise, Packaged Analytic Applications for Non-SAP Customers

SAP provides a broad range of packaged analytic business content (including predefined extractors, data store objects, InfoCubes and info queries) based on SAP NetWeaver BW and BEx tools for SAP applications. However, unlike its competitors Oracle and IBM Cognos, SAP does not offer domain- and industry-specific packaged analytic applications from non-SAP applications without the requirement for implementing SAP NetWeaver BW as the technology foundation. Instead, SAP is currently offering enterprise industry- and domain-specific solutions as consulting offerings, some with rapid implementation assets developed by the SAP consulting organization or in conjunction with partners, such as RapidDecision and Noetix.

For the quick implementation of a narrow subject area for a specific enterprise application (such as Oracle E-Business Suite Payables or Accounts Receivable, SAP Financial Accounting and so on), as either a stepping stone to SAP NetWeaver BW or as a departmental packaged application option for non-SAP enterprise applications, SAP positions Rapid Marts. Rapid Marts gives customers predefined ETL code (for SAP Data Services), semantic modeling (SAP BusinessObjects universes) and reporting content (BusinessObjects Web Intelligence). However, customers should recognize that Rapid Marts are not enterprise-grade, prepackaged application solutions. They are siloed data marts without complex fact tables, the use of surrogate keys, or support for slowly changing dimensions (beyond type 1). If requirements evolve beyond the simple and departmental, or if SAP BI is the ultimate end game, moving from Rapid Marts to SAP BI or to a custom data warehouse would require a significant migration or reimplementation effort. Moreover, Rapid Marts have no multidimensional OLAP functionality, nor do they support planning, budgeting, forecasting or strategy management. SAP needs to deliver a more robust packaged analytic application solution for heterogeneous customers that do not want to embrace SAP NetWeaver BW. Until SAP delivers on a more robust analytic application, both SAP and Business Objects customers should treat Rapid Marts as a tactical option.

Integration Effort Due to Numerous Acquisitions Still in Progress; Customers Will have to Migrate to Re-Architected Products

The level of integration with SAP NetWeaver BW varies by SAP BusinessObjects tool. The newly introduced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, which combines the search-based BI capabilities of the previously named Polestar with the SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, enables SAP NetWeaver BW casual business users to access and analyze SAP NetWeaver BW content via a search interface and the exploration capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. This tool may provide the best incentive to date for SAP NetWeaver BW customers to buy into the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform sooner rather than later, because it gives an entirely new user class the ability to derive insights from SAP NetWeaver BW data, which in the past had been restricted to trained business analysts using the difficult to use BEx. Crystal Reports has been deployed for production reporting in many SAP NetWeaver BW implementations, because Crystal Reports was handled under an OEM arrangement by SAP, as SAP NetWeaver BW's production reporting tool, until SAP BW 7.0. In fact, Crystal Reports uses its own interface to connect to SAP NetWeaver BW and allows a direct link between different sources without using SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. However, even though BEx tools are widely recognized as less functional in most areas and more difficult to use than Web Intelligence, they are currently better optimized to run against SAP NetWeaver BW. Indeed, SAP has far fewer references that are successfully using Web Intelligence versus SAP NetWeaver BW than it has for Crystal Reports. Enhancing the universe to better support the multi-dimensional concepts in SAP NetWeaver BW and other OLAP data sources is a key road map enhancement, which should improve the use of Web Intelligence with SAP NetWeaver BW data sources. Although the overall road map is not expected to be complete until 2011, SAP has made or is planning a number of near-term enhancements to improve the integration of the performance of Web Intelligence versus SAP NetWeaver BW. These include:



• The Data Federator SAP BW Structured Query Language (SQL) connector. SQL access to BW (XI3.0 SP1) enables access to SAP NetWeaver BW data and combines it with other sources. It also provides the ability to access the data store objects (DSOs).

• OLAP universe refresh when BEx queries change, to reduce the maintenance and total cost of ownership (TCO) of SAP NetWeaver BW OLAP universes (XI3.1 SP2).

• Automatic relational universe generation, initially introduced in XI 3.0, is enhanced to include automatic incremental updates with changes in SAP NetWeaver BW to improve life cycle management (XI3.1 SP2).

• Designer software development kit (SDK) for SAP universes (XI3.1).

• Removed the 1 million cell limitation from Web Intelligence queries against SAP NetWeaver BW. This is one of many unique optimizations that will not be exposed as an application programming interface (API) to other third-party tools (XI3.1 SP2).

• Eliminated the OLAP Data Access (ODA) layer in processing a query from Web Intelligence against OLAP Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) in SAP BW (queries are processed in Multidimensional Expressions [MDX]) to reduce the overhead, and eliminated multiple stages in the processing to improve performance (for example, removed some of the sorting) (XI3.1 SP2).

• Query stripping in Web Intelligence will allow users to create a lighter-weight report from an existing BEx query, which may contain many objects that may not contribute to the report. This capability allows users to bring back specific dimensions and measures from a query (XI 3.1 SP3).

• Xcelsius and Web Intelligence BEx query and views connector based on directly accessing the SAP NetWeaver BI consumer services (BICS) API (planned for 2009 and 2010 for Xcelsius and Web Intelligence, respectively).

• Data lineage and impact analysis to SAP NetWeaver BW from SAP clients in Metadata Manager (XI3.1 SP2).

Web Intelligence can currently access SAP BW via the universe by connecting to BI InfoCubes, BI MultiProviders and BEx Queries, but not DSOs (unless Data Federator is also deployed). Moreover, for improved performance and to avoid problems with hierarchies and navigational attributes, SAP typically recommends connecting a universe to SAP NetWeaver BW through a BEx Query. Despite progress and the release of some unique optimizations, suboptimal access, overhead and redundancy created by running Web Intelligence against SAP NetWeaver BW will continue to pose challenges for SAP NetWeaver BW customers until the road map is complete. Therefore, SAP NetWeaver BW customers should carefully evaluate the move to Web Intelligence, with a full understanding of best practices (by working with SAP field teams or with a knowledgeable system integrator), until SAP NetWeaver BW access and integration is enhanced when the road map is complete. The lack of references demonstrating strong Web Intelligence integration with SAP NetWeaver BW has caused many SAP customers to consider alternative BI platforms, such as Arcplan and Information Builders, which have more references.

Xcelsius may be deployed for dashboarding against SAP NetWeaver BW using Web services, although like Web Intelligence, there are a limited number of reference customers actually deploying it. As mentioned, beyond the query as a Web service option today, SAP has released an Xcelcius-to-BEx Query connector based on BICS for those SAP NetWeaver BW customers that are focused on an immediate dashboarding need. This BICS access will also be available to Web Intelligence in the 2010 time frame.



For SAP NetWeaver BW customers that are successfully using BEx Analyzer or that have OLAP analysis as a key requirement, the functional limitations of SAP BusinessObjects' Voyager should also delay migration. Until Pioneer is released and stable, it will still be beneficial to leverage BEx Analyzer and BEx Web Analyzer for new projects or those requiring an Excel interface for analysis, as they provide superior OLAP features compared to SAP BusinessObject Voyager. In addition to being better optimized for the analysis of SAP NetWeaver BW data, BEx Analyzer is a more fully featured Excel-based ad hoc analysis tool for SAP NetWeaver BW. Therefore, due to limitations in functionality and BW access, current BEx Analyzer users should not migrate to SAP BusinessObjects Voyager, the OLAP analysis tool, until it is combined with functionality in BEx Analyzer in the version 1 Pioneer release, and proven to be stable. Pioneer version 1 is expected to be released in early 2010. SAP plans a migration path in 2011 to Pioneer for standard BEx Analyzer workbooks and BEx Web templates, via the Pioneer Design SDK.

Moreover, SAP NetWeaver BW customers must also decide the role of BEx and a migration time frame to the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform. Cost, integration with SAP NetWeaver BW and functional equivalence are all key considerations. From a cost perspective, while BEx is free to SAP application customers, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform is not. SAP customers must weigh the decision and time frame for remaining with existing BEx tools (BEx Report Designer, BEx Analyzer, BEx Web Analyzer and BEx Web Application Designer) that will receive only minor enhancements, versus committing to the additional expenditure and migration effort needed to move to the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform or to other BI platform alternatives with strong SAP NetWeaver BW connectivity..

Until the integration is complete, disparate code bases make the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio tougher to support, particularly during major migrations. Moreover, while SAP appears to be putting significant development effort and planning into minimizing migration complexity from product integration, migration effort is an unknown until it has been successfully done by a number of customers. Until migration experiences are known, customers face an uncertain migration effort to new versions once the re-architected products are delivered.

Product Limitations From a BI platform component perspective, SAP has few holes. The BI platform user survey identified OLAP and predictive analytics as the only current functional BI platform gaps. Beyond the bifurcated packaged analytic application strategy and limitations discussed in a previous section, SAP lags behind other leading vendors in delivering a best-in-class OLAP engine and OLAP analysis capability. While BusinessObjects was the first BI vendor to introduce a semantic layer, limitations in the universe's support for multiple data sources and multidimensional concepts now lags other vendors (such as IBM Cognos, Oracle and MicroStrategy). Moreover, BusinessObjects made the design choice to develop different front-end tools to address end-user requirements, rather than creating a unified front-end architecture that enables an integrated authoring workflow, as other leading vendors (IBM Cognos, Oracle and MicroStrategy) have developed. See Table 2 for an overview of the limitations of SAP BusinessObjects' BI platform.



Table 2. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform — Product Limitations

Capability/SAP BusinessObjects Product(s)/Feature

Comments

OLAP/Ad Hoc Analysis Microcubes SAP BusinessObjects Voyager/Pioneer

Beyond the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver BW (which are considered less functional in terms of usability and support for advanced features such as dynamic calculations and out-of-the-box financial intelligence than other leading OLAP engines), the SAP BusinessObjects BI toolset does not include an OLAP engine. Web Intelligence and the full client leverage SAP BusinessObjects' microcube technology, which enables report-level caching that is stored in-memory on the SAP BusinessObjects server. The microcube capability enables the end user to interact with the result set of a query. Pioneer, which is the road map integration of SAP BusinessObjects Voyager and SAP BEx Analyzer, will be optimized for accessing SAP NetWeaver BW's OLAP capability, and will also continue to leverage third-party best-in-class OLAP engines like Oracle Essbase and Microsoft Analysis Services. However, users are slow to adopt Voyager, which had limited adoption as a version one product in the first place, as they wait for SAP to deliver the integrated platform. SAP BusinessObjects Voyager, the current ad hoc OLAP analysis tool, is a relatively new product providing a separate interface (from Web Intelligence) for analyzing multidimensional data sources. It accesses MDX data sources, directly bypassing the universe. OLAP/ad hoc analysis is the only area where the SAP BEx tools provide more robust functionality than SAP BusinessObjects BI tools (but only for SAP NetWeaver BW data sources). As a new product, Voyager provides basic analysis and pivoting capabilities. Voyager offers a limited set of chart types (although it is based on the new charting engine and has been improved in XI3.1), calculations and logical functions and does not provide support for custom MDX. Pioneer is expected to be available in 2010 and will provide a superset of capabilities from BEx Analyzer (Excel), BEx Analyzer (Web) and SAP BusinessObjects Voyager, according to SAP's March 2008 road map. According to the plan, for Pioneer Web parts of Voyager technology will be used — for example, multiple back-end connectivity to Microsoft Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase; and all charting in Pioneer will be based on the SAP BusinessObjects visualization library (a common component also used by Voyager and Explorer and, in future releases, by Web Intelligence). For Pioneer Office, SAP will leverage the Excel-based OLAP analysis capabilities in BEx Analyzer. Significantly, the connectivity for Pioneer Web and Office to SAP NetWeaver BW will not be based on MDX, but rather on SAP's own proprietary technology used for the BEx integration. Combining the best features of BEx Analyzer with Voyager into a new product, Pioneer is expected to result in a more robust and easier to use product. Once introduced, users of either BEx Analyzer or Voyager should ensure that the new version 1 of the Pioneer product is stable through references before deploying it, as Pioneer will be a completely new product. Carefully assess the migration effort based on references (see "Best Practice for Migrating Reports to New BI Platforms").




Comments

Lack of a Unified Front-End Architecture

Unlike many of its competitors, Business Objects never focused its efforts on unifying front-end architecture. Like Web Intelligence, the BusinessObjects OLAP tool, Voyager, can also access OLAP data sources, but the interface is different from the standard Web Intelligence interface. Users don't have seamless navigation between an ad hoc query experience and a multidimensional "slicing and dicing" experience. With the 2010 release, users who do multidimensional analysis can reuse their Pioneer queries and turn their analyses into formatted, interactive reports in Web Intelligence that can be combined with other data (non-OLAP or personal Excel files) and shared, scheduled and published to other users. The Crystal Reports authoring environment is completely different and unintegrated from a workflow perspective with the Web Intelligence, Voyager or Explorer environments. While Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports may be linked via URLs, a user cannot open and format a Web Intelligence report, Voyager, or Explorer analysis in Crystal Reports. There are also differences between Web Intelligence documents versus Crystal Reports documents in terms of the degree of interactivity within the reports. Moreover, Voyager does not use the universes at all; support for the common semantic layer is not planned until Pioneer version 2 (2011). Crystal Reports, on the other hand, can access a universe for a subset of requirements (not all), but it does not have to. Moreover, Xcelsius, the dashboarding tool, does not directly access the universes — it does so through Query as a Web Service. While not a focus in the past, SAP has stated that its unified semantic layer enhancements in a future release will result in a more seamless and consistent experience between its client tools.

Semantic Layer With the major version following 3.0, SAP's investment in universes is expected to bring a new modeling environment, allowing users to define rich dimensional and relational concepts. However, until that time, although BusinessObjects was the first BI platform vendor to introduce a semantic layer, today it lags behind the semantic layers of other leading BI platform vendors (such as MicroStrategy, Oracle and IBM Cognos) in the following areas: The platform still does not have a completely unified semantic layer. While both Crystal Reports and other SAP BusinessObjects clients can leverage SAP BusinessObjects universes, Crystal Reports still maintains its own metadata model, Business Views. Crystal Reports can build reports off universes, but for most capabilities and instances, Business Views (implemented in Crystal Reports version 10) are more appropriate. As long as current versions of Crystal Reports will be used with SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, this issue will continue to exist. SAP has announced plans to address this issue in the next major release by delivering a Java Crystal Reports with access only through the semantic layer. The evolution of challenges for defining non-additive measures in the universe. Prior to BusinessObjects version XI2, defining non-additive measures (such as a ratio like margin %, profit %, operating expenditure or ROI) within the universe is not advisable because on-report analysis, including level-based drilling into the microcube, is likely to produce incorrect results. As a work-around, these types of metric prior to BusinessObjects XI2 are typically defined as a report-level attribute. Defining a report-level attribute is not only complex for business users; without centralizing report metrics in a single metadata repository for use across all users and tools, maintaining consistent metrics definitions (single source of truth) across large numbers of reports is manually intensive and error-prone. As of BusinessObjects XI2, a new feature, "Query Drill," set at the report level, enables any drill operation performed on the report (down or up) and generates a delta query to the underlying source. This enables the definition of non-additive




Comments

measures in the universe in XI2 to directly query the underlying data source. This, in combination with the query drill, enables users to interact with measures in interactive-viewing mode. However, the challenge of creating on-report sections and breaks that require a different grouping set of data remained in BusinessObjects XI2. Customers would have had to create separate queries for each grouping set and use the DP synchronization to combine them. New Smart Cube technology (also known as Smart Measures) in XI 3.0 is intended to address this limitation. With Smart Cubes, the various queries for non-additive measures are automatically computed and run based on the report layout. However, Gartner has not been able to confirm the effectiveness of this feature with SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.0 references. Challenges when defining semi-additive measures in the universe. Semi-additive measures, such as inventory on hand or account balance, cannot as easily be defined in the semantic layer as in other tools (such as OBIEE and MicroStrategy). Business users must create a report with multiple data providers and understand the concept of semi-additive. They must use derived tables and aggregate awareness, with possible time transformation tables, using the multi-DP sync function. (The multi-DP sync function refers to the process of combining multiple data sources in the same report object, where data providers are synchronized by creating a join between data providers based on common objects.) Use of this functionality is typically complex for most business users. Multiple data sources in metadata. Unlike other vendors (IBM Cognos, OBIEE and MicroStrategy), currently each universe can access one data source. SAP customers are more likely to deploy multiple, often dozens, of universes to support various applications. Customers of competitive BI platforms such as MicroStrategy, Oracle and Cognos typically use fewer semantic layer models to deliver the same number of applications. As a work-around to this limitation, SAP will either recommend (1) using Web Intelligence to bring together data from different universes on the BI client side (on the report); (2) consolidating the data into one data source (for example, a warehouse); or (3) deploying Data Federator with the BI platform to integrate more than one data source into the universe. However, until Data Federator is built into the BI platform, this approach requires the deployment of an additional product. Moreover, for existing SAP customers licensing BI solutions under the previous licensing model ("a la carte"), SAP BusinessObjects' Data Federator is also licensed as an additional product. Multiple layers. As mentioned earlier, while Crystal Reports can access the universe for a subset of capabilities, it doesn't have to. It can access data sources directly, and as of Crystal Reports version 10, it can access data sources through its own semantic layer, Business Views. Some limitations (there are others that are well documented by SAP BusinessObjects) when using Crystal Reports against universes include the following. (1) Creating a Crystal Report based on multiple data sources using a universe is not possible unless Data Federator is also deployed. Without Data Federator, this will require direct data source access or use of the Business View. (2) Report bursting in Crystal of a report based on a universe is possible, but would generate a query to the database for each bursted report recipient, which is resource-intensive.

Built-In Data Federation

Data federation enables a single unified virtual view of one or more data sources. Unlike competitors Oracle and MicroStrategy, SAP BusinessObjects users must implement an additional, optional SAP BusinessObjects product for data federation — Data Federator. However, integration of Data Federator into the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform is on the SAP road map for the next major release in the mid-2010 time frame.




Comments

Predictive Analytics SAP has recently introduced Predictive Analytics Workbench through an OEM relationship with SPSS. To enable more pervasive use of predictive analytics, users of Predictive Analytics Workbench can take models built in the workbench and integrate them into Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports 2008 or Xcelsius dashboards via the SAP BusinessObjects universe. For example, users can see a list of profitable customers within a SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report, or monitor customer profitability KPIs in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise, or in a Microsoft Office environment. While SAP continues to invest in predictive analytics in other areas of the product portfolio with a road map to provide predictive analytics to more business users, IBM's planned acquisition of SPSS puts the current strategy at risk and may cause SAP to rethink its approach.

BEx = Business Explorer, BW = Business Warehouse, DP = data processing, KPI = key performance indicator, MDX = Multidimensional Expressions, OBIEE = Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, OLAP = online analytical processing, ROI = return on investment


Opportunities

Provide Tools and Guidance to Reduce Confusion in the SAP and Former Business Objects Installed Bases

Since SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, the most frequent Gartner inquiries from the SAP NetWeaver BW installed base involve questions about migration strategy and product road map.

SAP has an opportunity to reduce uncertainty in the SAP NetWeaver BW installed base and ensure the best migration path for its customers by offering architectural and product migration guides, tools and services to help them evaluate options. This, combined with a clearer road map on the evolution plans for SAP NetWeaver BW in support of non-SAP data sources, would go a long way to helping existing and new SAP customers understand and assess their BI platform options, based on their specific requirements. To address this issue, SAP has initiated a project targeted at its field organization to provide support guides and best practices to customers implementing BI against BW, which has the potential to reduce confusion in the SAP installed base.

While the SAP NetWeaver BW installed base is a concern, the recent pricing model change threatens to introduce confusion into the SAP BusinessObjects installed base, particularly when these users are asked to convert to the new pricing model. SAP can preempt user frustration by pricing tools for users to transparently estimate the TCO and functionality impact of moving to the new pricing model (see "Q&A: What SAP BusinessObjects' Revamped Pricing Means to You").

Leveraging In-Memory Innovations to Enhance a Heterogeneous BI Platform

With the introduction of Business Intelligence Accelerator, now called Business Warehouse Accelerator, SAP was early in applying in-memory technology to improve SAP NetWeaver BW-based BI application performance. By the end of 2009, SAP is expected to introduce an open, non-SAP NetWeaver BW version of BWA, supporting the indexing of multiple data sources with data federation as a key component. This performance optimization layer will improve SAP's attractiveness in heterogeneous environments.



Provide an Open, Non-SAP NetWeaver BW Option for Packaged Analytic Applications

Increasingly, organizations are looking to lower TCO by deploying out-of-the-box, packaged analytic applications. Oracle and IBM Cognos both offer a broad set of functional and industry role-based analytic applications that include packaged ETL scripts for major ERP applications, prebuilt data models, a prebuilt semantic layer and prebuilt analytic content (for example, queries, reports and dashboards). While SAP offers a broad set of packaged business content for SAP NetWeaver BW, there is no equivalent enterprise solution for implementing packaged analytic applications without deploying BW.

Non-SAP BusinessObjects portfolio customers, or SAP application customers with other ERP systems looking for packaged analytic applications today, must turn to alternative products. This allows competing products to establish a wedge in SAP BusinessObjects' portfolio accounts, from which to expand in the future. Recapturing this business by offering non-SAP NetWeaver BW-based packaged applications represents an opportunity to expand revenue and protect against an incursion from alternatives into existing accounts.

Capitalize on Resurgence in Departmental and Workgroup BI By Leveraging Existing SMB Strategy

The major BI platform players left a void in the market when they evolved their BI capabilities into integrated platforms to support enterprise requirements. Business users in search of more lightweight, easy to deploy and use platforms requiring minimal IT assistance turned to vendors such as QlikView, Tableau and Tibco Spotfire, leveraging technologies such as in-memory and advanced interactive visualizations to fill this gap. More than any other megavendor, SAP has demonstrated a strong commitment to its SMB strategy and SAP BusinessObjects' Edge BI product line, which now includes data exploration technology (Explorer). Changing user restrictions (which were initially limited to a single instance and 20 concurrent users per organization when first launched) to multi-instance in separate departments and 50 concurrent users per instance, was a positive move, as it broadens the Edge offering's opportunities for deployment in departments (particularly multiple departments within an enterprise). Moreover, SAP now offers a BI starter package based on SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Premium for up to 100 named users on one or more servers. However, because it is based on SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, the BI starter package may have too big and complex a footprint to meet a key departmental requirement to deploy platforms quickly with minimal IT assistance. Moreover, the SAP BusinessObjects starter kit but does not include SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to address the ease of use needs that have a key purchasing driver for the "QlikView" user.

As business users exert greater influence on BI buying decisions, this rapidly growing market segment will continue to represent an opportunity for SAP, particularly if it can continue to enhance SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI ease of use (beyond Edge) and ease of deployment (beyond configuration and installation acceleration). Extending its SMB strategy beyond simply repacking its enterprise BI platform and tools by further enhancing Edge's ease of use and deployment to better address business user and departmental needs will also serve to lessen the momentum of the rising alternatives. To counter emerging players, such as Spotfire, QlikTech, Tableau and Advisor, SAP could extend Explorer into an advanced data discovery and visualization tool supporting the Edge product line in addition to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. Adding predictive analytics for power user Data Discovery and Analysis types of use case would further enhance its value proposition compared with the emerging players. If SAP was to provide an offering to address this segment, it would be differentiated from many wedge alternatives, which cannot easily bridge the gap between departmental silos and enterprise deployments.



Drive Mainstream Adoption of Predictive Analytics and Embedded BI

Within the context of the overall drive to make BI more pervasive, there is a focus on two paths of innovation. First, as mentioned earlier, there is a resurgence of workgroup and personal BI solutions that focus on ease of use. In addition, there is a trend to encapsulate the complexities of BI and incorporate it into users' daily business processes by embedding analytics into business applications and processes.

SAP is well positioned to embed analytics within SAP applications and has articulated a number of such enhancements on its road map. This represents a significant opportunity to differentiate SAP applications as well as expand the use of BI within the SAP application installed base.

SAP has started to extend the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform to include predictive analytics through its partnership with SPSS (recently acquired by IBM), which makes it easier for business users to consume mining models using existing tools. Extending its packaged analytic applications program for SAP NetWeaver BW and non-SAP NetWeaver BW customers to include predictive analytics will go a step further in breaking down usage barriers. While in the short term this OEM relationship is expected to be unaffected, there could be a long-term risk to the current OEM strategy as IBM Cognos seeks to tightly integrate SPSS into the IBM Cognos 8 BI platform, using the integration of predictive analytics as its competitive differentiator.

Leverage SAP's Complex Event Processing/Business Activity Monitoring Assets to Deliver Operational BI

Enhancing the BI platform to support operational scenarios represents another significant opportunity that SAP is well positioned to capitalize on. First, SAP is leveraging its Live Enterprise capabilities for complex-event processing based on acquired assets from Imagineering. Making events first-class objects in the semantic layer and supporting the sharing of metadata to embed key performance indicators in process diagrams is on the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio road map for a later release (but not the next major release). Integrating events into the SAP BusinessObjects semantic layer will support more actionable BI, allowing users to automatically detect what decision, rule or threshold should be changed based on events. Extending this capability to optimize decisions and business processes represents additional opportunities for SAP to deliver innovation to its customers.

Extend BI Platform to Support Collaborative Decision Making

Although better decision making is frequently cited as the number one reason for investing in BI platforms, traditional BI deployments emphasize information delivery and analysis to support fact-based decision making. But information from BI systems and other decision inputs is typically disconnected from collaboration around decisions and the decision-making process. This reduces the quality and transparency of the resulting decisions. Recent major public- and private-sector decision-making failures suggest that decision makers often fail to react to rapid changes in the business environment that invalidate assumptions. Connecting and capturing this thread with decisions made and their outcomes allows organizations greater transparency into how decisions are made.

The convergence of technologies necessary for collaborative decision making, such as social software, BI and decision frameworks supporting a broad range of knowledge worker decisions, is not available as an out-of-the-box decision-support application today.

Gartner is predicting that, in 2009, technologies and business practices will converge to enable collaborative decision making that addresses this un-met need and market opportunity. Collaborative decision making is a new style of decision support system that allows decision makers to remotely collaborate in discussions around assumptions, incorporate relevant BI



analysis and other decision inputs, and explore and gain consensus around alternative courses of action using a decision support framework. Collaborative decision making combines social software with BI platform capabilities to bring decision makers together to assess relevant information and analysis, discuss an issue, brainstorm options, evaluate their pros and cons and agree on a course of action. We believe that existing BI platform vendors, like SAP, have the most to gain by delivering collaborative decision-making systems to the new market, because they would drive adoption of their BI software. SAP has existing partnerships with vendors such as LinkedIn and Jive that could be leveraged to capitalize on this opportunity (see "The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making," "Overcoming the Gap Between Business Intelligence and Decision Support," "Automating Decisions With Intelligent Decision Automation" and "The Future of Optimizing Decisions With a Decision Hub").

Become the Most Optimized BI Solution for SAP Environments

Although it is not the case today, SAP's road map focuses significant effort on optimizing the SAP BusinessObjects BI tool set for SAP NetWeaver BW environments. SAP is in a unique position to put in place proprietary APIs that will allow it to access the SAP NetWeaver BW Consumer Services API directly, and provide tight integration with the universe to streamline the multiple overhead layers that have been a significant barrier to performance for non-BEx client tools on top of SAP NetWeaver BW. (The specific optimization plans are listed above in the Weakness section, in the sub-section titled "Integration Effort Due to Numerous Acquisitions Still in Progress; Customers Will Have to Migrate to Re-architected Products.")

Threats

Questions Around the Role of SAP NetWeaver BW Confuse Customers

Post-acquisition, installed-base SAP NetWeaver BW customers, new SAP customers and existing Business Objects customers express differently rooted frustrations and confusion. As a result, many are delaying upgrades and migrations or even considering alternative BI solutions. Customers' concern springs from several things, including the role of SAP NetWeaver BW, confusion over the road map, the cost, incomplete product integration, and the lack of references for Web Intelligence on top of SAP NetWeaver BW.

SAP's acquisition of Business Objects forces its SAP NetWeaver BW customers, who have implemented the BEx BI tools, to re-examine their BI strategy. Existing SAP BusinessObjects BI customers often express frustration with the change in support, business practices and pricing following the SAP acquisition.

Existing SAP NetWeaver BW customers and new SAP customers must determine what role SAP NetWeaver BW will play as a data warehouse and a BI platform. Inquiries from new and installed-base SAP customers indicate that the implementation choices can be confusing and complex, and that there is no easy option for integration, migration or upgrades between one alternative or the other (see "SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence: Customers at a Crossroads").

A common decision that SAP NetWeaver BW customers face is the role of SAP NetWeaver BW as a data warehouse. SAP NetWeaver BW provides packaged connectors to SAP applications and business content, which can enable the rapid deployment of out-of-the-box operational reports for SAP, when minimal modification is needed to meet requirements. However, SAP NetWeaver BW is still perceived as complex, proprietary and lacking best-in-class performance and scalability (without the BW Accelerator). Moreover, integrating non-SAP data sources into SAP NetWeaver BW adds manual steps and complexity to modify and version BW data models to support non-SAP data. Improvements have been made to the process of integrating non-SAP data sources into SAP NetWeaver BW using data integrator, until the integration of SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator with SAP NetWeaver BW is complete. However, the use of SAP



NetWeaver BW as an enterprise data warehouse reference architecture in a heterogeneous environment will be more complex and labor-intensive when compared to a custom enterprise data warehouse alternative (built using Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, Sybase IQ and so on). (Note that Gartner does not recognize SAP BW as a data warehouse per se. For example, it is not evaluated on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for data warehouse platforms. Instead, Gartner maintains that SAP BW provides the components of a reference architecture.)

SAP has made progress in a couple of areas:

• SAP BusinessObjects Data Services can be used today with SAP NetWeaver BW for data quality and data integration, extraction and load of operational data, and data quality operations.

• SAP BusinessObjects Data Federator now allows direct access to data in SAP NetWeaver BW.

• SAP BusinessObjects' products now support and provide data lineage and impact analysis for SAP NetWeaver BW, in addition to the existing broad coverage of data sources.

• The SAP BusinessObjects team has driven a partnership with Teradata that will deliver an integration of SAP NetWeaver BW with the Teradata database (see "SAP and Teradata Partnership Will Strengthen Joint Solution").

Customer Installed Base Reluctant to Do Major Upgrades

SAP has a reputation for releasing unstable software (BusinessObjects 6.0, for example) and challenging migrations (BusinessObjects 6.5 to XI). This stems in part from the fact that the product architecture spans multiple code bases (for example, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius). As a result, organizations have demonstrated a reluctance to do major upgrades, which is why we see a high number of BusinessObjects 6.x and XI R2 shops still in production. Data in "BI Platforms User Survey: How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendors" shows that 60% of SAP BusinessObjects' portfolio customers report that they are on a previous version.

Right now Gartner sees a large legacy installed based that is reluctant to embrace SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.0, which has been shipping for more than a year (since March 2008). Despite assurances from SAP that it is investing heavily in making migrations as easy as possible, concern over how the re-architecture will affect migration as SAP and Business Objects combine their code bases only exacerbates this reluctance to do a major upgrade.

The Emergence of Credible, Low-Cost Alternatives Threatens Momentum

The convergence of a number of market factors, including a deteriorating economy, downward pricing pressure from Microsoft, open-source software, new disruptive vendors and the rising influence of the business user in BI platform sourcing decisions, threatens the installed base and new market opportunities for enterprise, high-end priced, high-end TCO vendors, such as SAP. Gartner inquiries suggest that a growing number of organizations, both newly considering a BI strategy and those with an installed BI vendor, are increasingly considering the following options in an effort to lower costs:

1. With Microsoft's new bundling of PerformancePoint Server components with SharePoint Server, many organizations faced with deteriorating budgets are realizing that they already own all the components of the Microsoft BI stack and are looking for ways to leverage these components to reduce the license cost of both existing and new BI applications. In fact, Gartner inquiries suggest that Microsoft is on most mid-market and enterprise BI platform selection shortlists, at least initially. Because many organizations



now already own Microsoft BI components, in the current economic environment organizations have a strong incentive to seriously consider this option.

2. MicroStrategy recently introduced a "free" and departmental packaging of its flagship BI platform in an effort to capture a larger share of the workgroup, departmental and SMB segment of the market. Organizations that might otherwise consider open source are also taking a hard look at the MicroStrategy alternative. Whereas MicroStrategy was previously largely excluded from these opportunities, due to its enterprise positioning and premium pricing, its shift in strategy is making it a viable option where low cost is a key requirement.

3. Although still a small group, an increasing number of organizations are considering open-source and SaaS vendors to reduce costs. They are also concluding that these offerings have matured "enough" to be seriously considered as viable alternatives to a traditional BI platform, or as meeting specific needs that in the past would otherwise be filled by buying more of the high-priced incumbent. This is especially true as discretionary IT budgets are frozen, ruling out the purchase of additional licenses. The market impact hasn't yet strongly been felt, but we expect open-source and SaaS adoption to accelerate in the recession.

4. Restrictions on budget resources for enterprise BI deployments, coupled with the rising influence of the business user in BI platform sourcing decisions, mean that departmental BI solutions offered by disruptive emerging vendors leveraging in-memory technologies and advanced visualizations (such as QlikTech, Tableau, Tibco Spotfire and Advizor) are increasingly attractive alternatives, despite the potential for creating departmental silos down the road. Due to their favorable economics and ease of deployment and use, many of these vendors have experienced much higher license revenue growth rates than traditional BI platform vendors, and continue to put pressure on incumbent, higher-priced, monolithic platform vendors like SAP.

Given Business Objects' early investment in an SMB strategy and SaaS, SAP is better positioned than most other leading BI platform vendors to mitigate this threat, and can capitalize on the opportunities that have given rise to many of these options.

Business Objects was early to respond to Microsoft's strategy of penetrating the small to midsize market as a wedge to expand into the enterprise. Beyond the introduction of crystalreports.com, it was one of the first major BI platform vendors to introduce SMB packaging of its enterprise offerings, Crystal Reports Server and SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, as part of an overall SMB-oriented go-to-market strategy. The recently developed SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence are specifically designed to address the needs of mid-market customers by combining SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI with prebuilt reports and dashboards. However, simply re-bundling enterprise products with lower price points and configuration and installation accelerators has not to date translated into a successful mid-market and departmental strategy to lessen the momentum of Microsoft and QlikView. The recent addition of Explorer to SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, to deliver an easy to use interface to casual users, addresses a major driver of departmental buying. However, as a repackaged enterprise product and tool, Edge does not address "ease of deployment," the second major driver of departmental buying. This limitation, if not addressed, will continue to hinder the product line's competitiveness in this market segment, where Microsoft and departmental solutions such as QlikView have achieved significant growth, and other vendors, such as MicroStrategy, are now well positioned.



Like Other Megavendors, Competing as a Heterogeneous AND Stack Vendor Risks Stretching Resources

According to Gartner's BI Market Model (see "Business Intelligence Platform Market Segments Defined"), SAP (and the other megavendors) must address the requirements of and sell to stack-centric IT-oriented buying organizations, and to business-oriented buying organizations with federated standards, technologies, tools and data governance. At the same time, independent BI vendors, such as MicroStrategy, Information Builders and Arcplan, while pinched by the consolidation and stack-centric trends in the market, have not disappeared as many predicted they might. They are often able to take advantage of the window of opportunity created by the confusion, dissatisfaction and incomplete road map integration resulting from the acquisition, by positioning their own SAP NetWeaver BW integration capabilities as viable alternatives. Although to date SAP has effectively served both types of buyer, the requirement to compete in a broad range of markets and buyers risks stretching SAP's resources and ability to succeed in both areas of the market, and may ultimately force it to focus more heavily on its stack-centric sweet spot.

Ad Hoc Query Usage Reaching Saturation; Expanded User Adoption Driven By Other User Paradigms

Historically a SAP BusinessObjects strength, the traditional ad hoc query paradigm — building ad hoc queries and reports by dragging and dropping dimensions and measures derived from a well constructed BI semantic layer — has reached its peak in terms of user adoption by the power users and analysts that typically make up 10% to 20% of potential BI users. But this paradigm is far too complex for the less sophisticated users that make up the rest of the organization. Future user adoption will most likely come from much easier to use reporting and analysis paradigms, such as prompted reports and interactive visualization, which the recent introduction of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer begins to address, but which so far have not been strong areas for SAP.

Implication for Company Being Profiled • SAP should continue its TCO reduction efforts in recognition of the fact that an

increasing percentage of BI consumers are cost-sensitive. It should be careful not to discount the potential of Microsoft and other low-cost alternative emerging vendors to erode its installed base and limit new sales opportunities by delivering lower cost and ease of use. Rather it should build on its existing investments in SMB offerings, to simplify deployment and authoring, and build on its easy to use SAP BusinessObjects Explorer interface, to better address this segment of the market.

• SAP should provide architectural guides, migration evaluation tools and new license model pricing tools to help its customers decide on the best migration approach with the lowest TCO.

• SAP should put enterprise-grade, non-SAP NetWeaver BW-based packaged analytic applications for all major ERP applications on its road map. Addressing industry-specific requirements and deploying packaged predictive analytics would address additional requirements that are being met in a limited way by the other major BI platform vendors (but which are likely to be a focus of IBM Cognos now that it has entered into an agreement to acquire SPSS).

• SAP should re-evaluate its strategy of providing overlapping functionality in multiple, unintegrated front-end tools (Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Voyager/Pioneer and Explorer), and chart the road map of integration for the front-end tool architecture. Given



Explorer's ease of use, as (if) functionality is enhanced to support more complex analysis, Explorer will likely replace Web Intelligence and Voyager for an increasing number of user scenarios.

• SAP should leverage its partnerships and culture of innovation to evolve BI platforms into better decision support systems that support collaborative decision making.

Company Overview Company Profile SAP acquired Business Objects in January 2008 for $6.8 billion — a major strategic change for SAP, which had previously focused on in-house product development with only smaller "tuck-in" acquisitions. Business Objects was founded in France in 1990, and was the first French company ever to list on the NASDAQ, in 1994. Acquiring Crystal Decisions in 2003 further grew the company, and it has since been a market share leader in the BI platform space. The company maintains its two main centers in Paris, France and San Jose, the U.S., with major R&D operations in Vancouver, Canada.

Gartner estimates that SAP BusinessObjects' portfolio revenue grew aggressively in 2008 — despite it being a year of integration — reaching $1.55 billion in the BI platform segment. This is mainly due to migrating the large numbers of application and legacy SAP BI users to premium BusinessObjects tools, and charging for it, bringing named user pricing into the SAP installed base, and raising maintenance to 22%.

Table 3 shows SAP's BI platform software revenue and market share position, most of which comes from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio (see "Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2008"). Table 4 lists SAP's BI platform products.

Table 3. SAP's BI Platform Revenue, 2007-2008 (Millions of Dollars)

2007 2008

Share of Revenues in Region (%) 2007

Share of Revenues in Region (%) 2008

Growth (%) 2007-

2008

North America 500.7 608.0 21.8% 23.5% 21.4%

Latin America 16.5 38.8 14.3% 24.0% 134.3%

Western Europe 411.6 698.0 24.8% 32.7% 69.6%

Eastern Europe 43.3 65.1 36.7% 39.4% 50.4%

Middle East and Africa 10.8 20.2 15.6% 21.5% 86.5%

Japan 32.4 43.4 16.3% 20.7% 34.2%

Asia/Pacific 56.1 77.6 18.2% 19.9% 38.2%

Total 1,071.4 1,551.0 22.4% 27.0% 44.8% BI = business intelligence Note: Total software revenue includes license and maintenance revenue. Both 2007 and 2008 revenues show legacy SAP BI and Business Objects BI platform revenues combined.


With its Edge and crystalreports.com offerings, SAP BusinessObjects has a stronger rapport with smaller and midsize companies than many of its competitors. Gartner estimates that SAP



BusinessObjects derives 44% of revenue from companies with fewer than 2,500 employees. Gartner also estimates that SAP BusinessObjects' strongest industry sectors are manufacturing, government, financial services and retail.

Table 4. SAP BusinessObjects' BI Platform Products

Offering SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1

Pixel Perfect Reporting Crystal Reports

Ad Hoc Reporting SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence SAP BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence

Ad hoc Analysis SAP BusinessObjects Voyager (soon to be Pioneer)

Dashboards SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Builder

OLAP Engine None per se — SAP BusinessObjects microcubes, a feature of Web Intelligence, cache universe data in memory for analysis

OnDemand (SaaS) BI crystalreports.com SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand SAP BusinessObjects Information OnDemand

BI Widgets BI Widgets

Office Integration SAP BusinessObjects Live Office

Event Management SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Crystal Reports

BI Applications SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages SAP Business Content

Data Federation SAP BusinessObjects Data Federator

Data Integration (ETL) SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis

Data Quality SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management software SAP BusinessObjects Universal Data Cleanse software SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for SAP solutions SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for Oracle's Siebel CRM SAP BusinessObjects Data Insight software SAP BusinessObjects Postalsoft software solutions SAP BusinessObjects Watchlist Security software

Scorecards Strategy Management (acquired by SAP, not part of the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform). Strategy Management has Web services integration with Xcelsius and SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. You can build a universe on top of the Strategy Management cube and build reports in Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and Xcelsius.

Predictive Analytics SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Workbench

Analytical MDM No stand-alone offering



Offering SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1

BI and Search SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Google OneBox integration IBM OmniFind integration SAP BusinessObjects Intelligent Search

Mobile SAP BusinessObjects Mobile

Semantic Layer Universes BI = business intelligence, ETL = extraction, transformation and loading, MDM = master data management, OLAP = online analytical processing, SaaS = software as a service


Methodology The vendor analyzed in this SWOT was selected as it is considered a leading player in the BI platform market.

The Gartner vendor SWOT analysis is designed for vendors to use as a supplement to their planning processes. Its primary value is as an independent analysis of the vendor's competitive situation. The SWOT analysis provides a unique independent view of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for a specific vendor in a specific market and geography. The specific geography (for example, globally or regionally) and market and/or submarket is based on Gartner Dataquest Market Segment definitions or market focuses (for example, small or midsize business [SMB]). Vendors are selected based on a variety of criteria such as growth rate, or major changes in positioning and channel strategy — they will not necessarily be the companies with the largest market share.

RECOMMENDED READING

"SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence: Customers at a Crossroads"

"SAP Launches SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to Drive BI Adoption"

"Q&A: What SAP BusinessObjects' Revamped Pricing Means to You"

"BI Platforms User Survey: How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendors"

"Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2008"

"The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making"

"Overcoming the Gap Between Business Intelligence and Decision Support"

"Automating Decisions With Intelligent Decision Automation"

"The Future of Optimizing Decisions With a Decision Hub"

This research is part of a set of related research pieces. See "Roundup of Business Intelligence and Information Management Research, 4Q09" for an overview.



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