SAP will release a new version of its SAP BusinessObjects Explorer platform in November, allowing for accelerated enterprise search and what it says is an improved user interface. The updated version of BusinessObjects Explorer will allow enterprise data sets besides those warehoused by SAP to be ported into the platform for analysis. SAP has launched a number of enterprise platforms and applications in 2009, frequently in collaboration with companies such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.SAP
announced Oct. 27 during its SAP TechEd conference in Vienna,
Austria, that it would roll
out a new version of its SAP BusinessObjects Explorer in November. The new
version will bring enhancements to the user interface as well as the ability to
search through any data source in order to parse out information relevant to
business needs, SAP said.
Allowing companies to use data sources outside of SAP
NetWeaver BW (SAP NetWeaver Business
Warehouse) potentially gives SAP a more
competitive profile in the areas of business intelligence and enterprise
search, as it expands the market for SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer beyond those companies already running SAP
applications.
The ability of BusinessObjects Explorer to take information from any
existing layer of data within the enterprisewhether it be housed by SAP,
Oracle, IBM DB2 or another sourcewas not
present in what SAP executives referred to
as the "first wave" of SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer, originally announced on May 12 during SAP's
annual Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla.
As with the new version, the original iteration of BusinessObjects Explorer
was designed to give workers near-instant access to data via a convenient dashboard.
At the time, SAP claimed that the software
was capable of searching through 900 million records in under 2.5 seconds.
SAP introduced BusinessObjects Explorer
in two iterations: a "standard" edition and an accelerated version
for sorting through massive amounts of enterprise data. Intel partnered with SAP
to co-engineer the in-memory processing abilities of SAP
NetWeaver BW Accelerator to optimize it to work with the Intel Xeon processor
5500 series.
For the new versionthe "second wave"of SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP announced that
it would collaborate with Cisco Systems to port the system onto more platforms.
The Cisco Unified Computing System, which combines Intel processors with 10
Gigabit Ethernet unified fabrics and expanded memory capability, is being
touted by both companies as offering "stronger scalability" for SAP
applications.
In addition, BusinessObjects Explorer now features a number of UI improvements,
including buttons on the dashboard that allow for more granular navigation
through data. After searching through a database of millions of records for,
say, the term "BMW," a car manufacturer can then select various
buttons to view city sales, sales by vehicle model and so on. The data can also
be displayed graphically in a pie or bar chart.
A further iteration of BusinessObjects Explorer is due in the first half of
2010.
In addition to BusinessObjects Explorer, other large-scale SAP
releases in 2009 include SAP Business Suite
7a platform that can be deployed either in its entirety or in specific
modulesand applications designed to aid enterprise compliance with government
regulations, including SAP
BusinessObjects Risk Management and SAP BusinessObjects Process Control.
SAP has announced collaborations with a
variety of companies, including Novell and Hewlett-Packard,
to push out its platforms and functionality. The SAP
and HP collaboration allowed the SAP
NetWeaver BW and SAP's BI-oriented
analytical applications to be deployed on the HP Neoview platform, resulting in
speeded-up management and sorting of large amounts of database information via
parallel processing and shared-nothing architecture.
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