SAP: Uneasy on the Eyes - ' Next Generation of SAP '
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The Technology
Need to compare a customer's sales history with others in its industry segment? Doing that today with SAP's business intelligence tools requires familiarity with its database format. Now, SAP wants to make pulling up a graph showing that kind of analysis as simple as pointing and clicking on a Web page.
As part of that push, the company last year decided to combine its business intelligence products with the NetWeaver infrastructure software, which acts as a hub to exchange data between the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system and other databases. The first version of NetWeaver Business Intelligence (what is now called Business Warehouse) is part of NetWeaver 2004s, a version released to a limited number of customers in October and scheduled to be generally available in the second quarter of 2006.
The promise: To make data analysis a common function that is easily available within any of SAP's operational applications, such as on an order-entry screen, as opposed to needing to access a separate business intelligence application. "It gives the end user actionable intelligence when you combine transaction data with analytics," says SAP's Lothar Schubert.
SAP has also developed 100 industry-specific applications to analyze transactional data. For instance, an analytic application for retailers is designed to track in-store promotions based on actual sales.